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MEMORIAL ADDRESSES 



Life and Character 

OF 

Charles Sumner, 



(A SENATOR OF MASSACHUSETTS,) 




DELIVERED IN THE 



Senate and Wouse of Representatives, 
forty-third congress, first session, 

/i 

April 27, 1874, 

WITH OTHER CONGRESSIONAL TRIBUTES OF RESPECT. 



Published by order of Congress. 



WASHINGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 
I874. 






ANNOUNCEMENTS 



The Death of Charles Sumner, 

A SENATOR OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES. 
Thursday, March 12, 1874. 

Rev. Byron Sunderland, D. D., Chaplain of the Senate, offered up the follow- 
ing prayer : 

O Lord God, our Father in heaven, we all do fade as a leaf before Thee ; one 
generation cometh and another goeth ; and so Thou standest this clay to plead with 
this Thy great people. Two honored heads lie low, and the sighing of sister cities 
responding in their grief is heard in all the land. The grave must receive her own ; 
we bow in silence and submission to Thy stroke; Christ is our only shield. Amen. 

Mr. Anthony, of Rhode Island. Mr. President : In the absence of the Senator 
to whom this saddest duty appertains, and who is detained from the Senate by illness, 
the surviving Senator from Massachusetts, I have been requested to make to you 
the formal announcement of an event which my heart refuses to accept, and which 
my lips hesitate to declare. It is an event which needs not to be announced, for its 
dark shadow rests gloomily upon this chamber, and not only upon the Senate and the 
capital, but upon the whole country, and the intelligence of which, borne on the 
mysterious wires that underlie the seas, has been already carried to the remotest 
lands, and has aroused profoundest sympathy wherever humanity weeps for a friend, 
wherever liberty deplores an advocate. The oldest member of this body in con- 
tinuous service, he who yesterday was the oldest, beloved for the graces and the 
virtues of his personal character; admired for his genius and his accomplishments; 
reverenced for the fidelity with which he adhered to his convictions ; illustrious for 
his services to the republic and to the world, has crossed the dark river that divides 
us from the "undiscovered country." 

Charles Sumner died yesterday. To-day, in humble submission to the divine will, 
we meet to express our respect for his character, our veneration for his memory. To- 
morrow, with solemn steps ami with sorrowing hearts, we shall bear him to the 



ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THE 



Massachusetts which he served so faithfully and which loved him so well ; and to her 
soil, precious with the dust of patriotism and of valor, of letters and of art, of states- 
manship and of eloquence, we shall commit the body of one who is worthy to rest by 
the side of the noblest and the best of those who, in the centuries of her history, 
have made her the model of a free commonwealth. But the great deeds which 
illustrated his life shall not be buried with him, and never shall the earth cover 
the immortal principles to which he devoted every energy of his soul — the consumma- 
tion and vindication of which, as his highest reward, a grac ous God permitted him 
to witness. 

Mr. President, this is not the time, nor is the office mine, to pronounce the words 
that are clue to this event. A future hour and more fitting utterances shall interpret 
to the American people the affectionate respect of the Senate for our dead associate, the 
homage which it renders to his life and character. 

Mr. President, I offer the following resolutions : 

Resolved, That a committee of six members be appointed by the President of the 
Senate /■/*> tempore, to take order for superintending the funeral of CHARLES Sumner, 
late a member of this body, which will take place to-morrow (Friday) at half-past 
twelve ; and that the Senate will attend the same. 

Resolved, As a further mark of respect entertained by the Senate for the memory of 
Charles Sumner, and his long and distinguished services to his country, that his 
remains be removed to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in charge of the Ser- 
geant-at-Arms, and attended by a committee of six Senators, to be appointed by the 
President of the Senate pro tempore, who shall have full power to carry this resolution 
into effect. 

Resolved, That, as an additional mark of respect to the memory of the deceased, the 
Senate do now adjourn. 

Mr. SCHURZ, of Missouri. I can say nothing to-day, but offer the following as an 
amendment to the resolutions : 

Resolved, That the Secretary communicate these proceedings to the House of Rep- 
resentatives, and invite the House of Representatives to attend the funeral ceremony 
in the Senate Chamber to-morrow, at half-past twelve o'clock. 

Mr. Anthony. I accept the amendment. 

Mr. Conkung, of New York. Mr. President, the absence of a committee of the 
Senate to follow the bier to-day of one who once presided here, is enough alone to 
warn us of the fitness of pausing for a space from the din and business of life. It was 
my purpose to move that the Senate adjourn in observance of the funeral of Mr. FlLL- 
MORE; but meanwhile we are covered by the shadow of a nearer grief. A vacant 
chair is here, long held by a Senator of distinguished eminence, and one of the most 
illustrious of Americans. Surely it is lit that we should arrest the business of the 
Senate and pay tribute to the long and remarkable life now closed. No honor will 
be paid to the dead statesman in which I would not join in sincerity and respect, and 
I second the resolutions moved by the Senator from Rhode Island without attempt- 
ing to add a word to the graceful and eloquent thoughts which have fallen from him. 

The President pro tempore, [Mr. Carpenter, of Wisconsin.] Then the question 
is, Will the Senate accept the resolutions as modified ? 

The resolutions were agreed to unanimously. 

The President pro tempore. The Senate stands adjourned until to-morrow at 
twelve o'clock. 



DEATH OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 

Thursday, March 12, 1874. 

The proceedings of the Senate on the announcement of the death of Chari.es Sum- 
ner, late a Senator of Massachusetts, were communicated to the House, and were, by 
direction of the Speaker, read. 

Mr. E. R. Hoar, of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker : The event which the reso- 
lutions of the Senate announce fell upon the ear of this House and of the country- 
yesterday with startling suddenness. Wherever the news of it spreads through this 
broad land, not only in this city, among his associates in the public councils ; not 
only in the old Commonwealth of which he was the pride and ornament, but in 
many quiet homes, in many a cabin of the poor and lowly, there is to-day inexpres- 
sible tenderness and profound sorrow. 

There are many of us who have known and loved the great Senator, whom this 
event unfits for public duties, or for any thoughts other than those of that pure life, 
that faithful public service, that assured immortality. 

In response to the invitation of the Senate I offer these resolutions : 

Resolved, That this House will attend the funeral of Charles Sumner, a Senator 
from Massachusetts, in the Senate Chamber, to-morrow, at half-past twelve o'clock, 
and upon its return to this Hall the Speaker shall declare the House adjourned. 

Resolved, That a committee of nine members be appointed, who, with the mem- 
bers of the House from Massachusetts, shall accompany the body of the deceased 
Senator to its place of burial in that Commonwealth. 

Resolved, That, as a testimonial of respect for the memory of the deceased, the 
members and officers of this House will wear the usual badge of mourning for thirty 
days. 

The question being taken on the resolutions, they were unanimously adopted, and, 
on motion of Mr. E. R. Hoar, the House adjourned. 



FUNERAL CEREMONIES OF 



THE FUNERAL CEREMONIES. 

The Congressional Funeral Ceremonies over the remains of Charles Sumner were 
performed in the Senate Chamber on Friday the 13th of March, under the direction 
of the committee of arrangements, Senators Anthony, Schurz, Frelinghuysen, 
Morrill of Maine, Stevenson, and Sherman. 

The members of the House of Representatives, headed by its Speaker and Clerk; 
the President of the United States and the members of his Cabinet ; the Diplomatic 
Corps ; the Supreme Court ; officers of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, with other 
officials; the personal friends of the deceased and the Massachusetts delegation in 
Congress, were assigned seats on the floor of the Senate. 

At half past twelve the remains were brought from the rotunda into the Senate 
Chamber, preceded by the Sergeant-atArms of the Senate and the committee of ar- 
rangements, and escorted by the pall-bearers, Senators Anthony, Schurz, Sar- 
gent, Oglesby, Stockton, and McCreery. 

Rev. J. G. Butler, Chaplain of the House of Representatives, read I Cor., xv., 
22-28, and then offered the following prayer : 

Great God, we bow reverently in Thy presence. Thou hast done it. Teach us wis- 
dom as we walk among the open graves. Bless the millions whose hearts gather 
tenderly around this coffin to-day. Bless our own great land, and give unto us con- 
tinued victories of truth and righteousness. We ask these mercies in the name and 
for the sake of Him who hath taught us, when we pray, to say : Our Father, who 
art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name ; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on 
earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread ; and forgive us our 
trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temp- 
tation, but deliver us from evil : for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the 
glory, forever. Amen. 

Rev. Byron Sunderland, D. D., Chaplain of the Senate, read Psalm xxxix, 
5-13, and Psalm xc, and offered the following prayer : 

Let us pray. Almighty and everlasting God, before Whom the world, and all that 
it contains, is as the dust of the balance ; before Whom change and time flee away 
like a shadow; yet art Thou the confidence of all the ends of the earth; for it is in 
Thee that we live, and move, and have our being; because Thou hast made of one 
blood all men who dwell on the face of the earth ; because Thou hast formed and 
fashioned us, and placed us in our lot. Thou hast appointed the bounds of our hab- 
itation, and Thou hast numbered all our days : and it has pleased Thee, O Lord, our 
God, in the fullness of Thine own time, to send among us Thy son, our Saviour, 
Jesus Christ, the Lord God manifest in the flesh, to bring to us the expectation of 
light and life, and of immortality. And so with Him, in the successive centuries, it 
has pleased Thee to raise up the prophets and apostles, the heroes and princes of the 
world. It has pleased Thee, in the conflict and turmoil of this our mortal state, to 



CHARLES SUMNER. 



send forth the ministers of Thy grace and providence, endowed and panoplied for 
their mighty task. And so, in all the crises of the times, when enormous evils had 
to be encountered ; when the old order of things had to be overthrown ; when the 
new conditions for the new energies of the human race had to be created, Thou hast 
planted Thy workmen at every point, and Thou hast fitted, and guarded, and upheld 
them with courage and with strength. 

C), Lord our God, how marvelous are all Thy works and ways ! How marvel- 
ous dost Thou still continue this day before us and before all men, as much in re- 
moving away Thy servants from their field of labor as in sending them into it when 
Thou wilt ; so that the day of our death is fuller of meaning than the day of our 
birth, because it is a grander lesson of our manhood, because it is a chapter far ad- 
vanced in the book of human destiny. 

And now Thou hast removed away from us a man who had stood so long as a 
prince of the earth, a man whose name and life and character and fame are forever 
linked with all that is sacred in human institutions, and all that is dear to human 
hearts. O Lord, our God, we are all bereaved together. The Senate, the Congress, 
the capital, the country, all have been made desolate. And the old Plymouth State, 
where so long ago the Pilgrims came — she sits to-day in mourning, a mother weep- 
ing for her prostrate son; and the white men and black men, and all men of every 
name and race throughout the world, shall this day be touched with the grief of this 
sudden stroke of Thy providence. But we can say nothing against it before Thee, 
O Thou righteous Judge and Supreme Ruler of mankind. Yet peradventure Thou 
wilt vouchsafe Thine ear to hear the prayer of Thy servants now for all those who 
have been afflicted in this dispensation, for the surviving but scattered members of 
his own family and kindred, for those who were so near to his person and in his pres- 
ence through all the phases of his private and public life ; for those children of that 
enduring race for whose advancement his great powers have been so long employed; 
for all his companions and contemporaries in the high and lofty circles of human 
civilization, both at home and abroad; for his colleagues and fellow-Senators in this 
chamber, and for the Representatives, the people, and the authorities of his native 
State; and for all those in every class and in every condition who this day so sin- 
cerely lament his loss. O, grant to all these the grace and the consolation of Thy 
Spirit. Sanctify to them and to this nation this most impressive instruction of Thy 
providence. 

And now we beseech Thee, O Lord, bless Thy servant the President of the 
United States, and the members of his Cabinet ; bless the governors and legislatures 
of the States; and, we beseech Thee, bless the judges of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, and all the magistrates in the land. Bless the officers and men of the 
Army and Navy of the United States. Bless all that are in positions of responsi- 
bility, of trust, and of honor among this great people. Bless the teachers and in- 
structors of the nation. Bless those who have the charge of the transmission of intel- 
ligence, and the conductors of the public press. And we beseech Thee, O Lord, bless 
all that are engaged in any walk or pursuit of life, in any department of human labor 
or enterprise, for the promotion of the race and the comfort of this world. And we 
beseech Thee, O Lord, bless any that may be under the pains and penalties and 
burdens of this life, to cheer, to comfort, to strengthen, and to uphold them. 



And now, we beseech Thee, to give to us, one and all, a sense of true humility 
and unfeigned contrition for our sins. Fill us with the spirit of repentance toward 
Thee and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Pardon our iniquities, and blot out our 
transgressions before Thee; and accept us, one and all, as Thy sons and daughters, 
through whom alone, and Thy work of atonement and effectual intercession, we shall 
be saved. 

And now, O Lord our God, be graciously pleased to go with those who shall bear 
away forever from this place the body of our lamented friend. Give them safe con- 
duct in the sad journey; and we beseech Thee, in Thy kind providence, let all the 
arrangements for his obsequies be fittingly made among that noble but now stricken 
people who await the arrival of the funeral-train by the old Cradle of Liberty. 

O God, the God of our fathers, bless this nation and all the nations. Bless us and 
all men together. And, when we come to die, open Thou for us the portals of eter- 
nity, and crown every soul with a pure, a blessed, and a glorious immortality. 
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen. 

The President pro tempore, [Senator Carpenter, of Wisconsin.] The services 
to be performed by the committee of arrangements having been terminated, the Senate 
of the United States intrusts the mortal remains of Charles Sumner to its Sergeant- 
at-Arms and a committee appointed by it, charged with the melancholy duty of con- 
veying them to his home, there to be committed, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust 
to dust, in the soil of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Peace to his ashes ! 

The remains were then escorted by many of those present to the station of the 
Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, where they were placed on a special train, which 
left at 3 o'clock, conveying also the Senate committee of arrangements — Senators 
Anthony, Schurz, Sargent, Oglesby, Stockton, and McCreery, with the 
House committee: Representatives Hurlburt, Hale, Foster, Rainey, Clay- 
ton, Scudder, Randall, Beck, and Hancock; the Chaplain of the Senate; the 
physician, the private secretary, the former committee-clerk, and an executor of the 
deceased ; and the members of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress, attended 
by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate. 

Proper tributes of respect were paid at Philadelphia, New York, New Haven, 
Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and intermediate stations. When the funeral-train 
entered the State of Connecticut, Colonel Chanley, of the military staff of Governor 
Ingersoll, and W. T. Ingersoll, the governor's private secretary, presented a letter 
in which the governor, in testimony of the public respect for the mournful duty of 
the Congressional committee, had ordered those members of his official family to 
accompany them through the State. At Springfield, Colonels Storer and Palfrey, of 
the staff of Governor Washburn, of Massachusetts, with a committee of the State 
legislature, met the funeral-train to accompany the Congressional committee to 
Boston. 

Arriving at Boston, the remains, with their escort, were taken to the State-house, 
and were borne into Doric Hall, where a catafalque had been prepared for their re- 
ception. The Shaw Guard, an infantry company composed of colored men, were 
posted as a guard of honor about the catafalque, and around it stood Governor 
Washburn, with his staff, members of the legislature, and many distinguished citizens 
of Massachusetts. 



Senator ANTHONY, chairman of the Senate committee, having been presented to 
Governor Washburn by Colonel Storer, of his staff, said: 

May it please Your Excellency: We are commanded bv the Senate to render back 
to you your illustrious dead. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, you dedicated to 
the public service a man who was even then greatly distinguished. He remained in 
it, quickening its patriotism, informing its counsels, and leading in its deliberations 
until, having survived in continuous service all his original associates, he has closed 
his earthly career. With reverent hands, we bring to you his mortal part, that it 
may be committed to the soil of the renowned commonwealth that gave him birth 
lake it ; it is yours. The part which we do not return to you is not wholly yours 
to receive, nor altogether ours to give. It belongs to the country, to mankind, to 
freedom, to civilization, to humanity. We come to you with the emblems of mourn- 
ing, which faintly typify the sorrow that swells the breasts which they cover So 
much we must concede to the infirmity of human nature. But, in the view of reason 
and philosophy, is it not rather a matter, of high exultation that a life so pure in its 
personal qualities, so high in its public aims, so fortunate in the fruition of noble 
effort, has closed safely, without a stain, before age had impaired its intellectual vigor 
before tune had dimmed the luster of its genius ! 

May it please Your Excellency: Our mission is completed. We commit to you 
the body of Charles Sumner. His undying fame the Muse of History has already 
taken into her keeping. 

Governor Washburn, advancing towards the Senate committee, replied: 
Gentlemen: It becomes my painful duty to receive from your hands all that 
remains of our Great Senator. I wish to thank you, in the name of the State, for 
your labor of love, in thus transmitting to our keeping this precious dust. We 
receive it at your hands with the assurance that it shall be guarded most tenderly, 
and the spot to which it shall be borne for its final resting-place, being baptised by 
such precious blood, shall ever hereafter be looked upon as consecrated ground. In 
the mean time, I commit it to the careful keeping of the committee of our legislature, 
selected for this special purpose. Permit me to welcome you to the hospitalities of our 
State, and to assure you that no effort of ours shall be wanting to make your brief 
stay with us as agreeable as possible under the circumstances which have brought 
you hither. 

Thanking you again for your marked sympathy in this hour of sore trial, I bid 
you all a hearty welcome, with the assurance that your lender regard on this occasion 
shall never be forgotten. 

The remains of Charles Sumner lay in slate on Sunday and on Monday morning 
in the Doric Hall, at the state-house. On Monday, at 3 o'clock p. m., they were 
removed to the King's Chapel, followed by the Congressional committees, the Vice- 
President of the United States, the Massachusetts delegation in Congress, the Gov- 
ernor and the Legislature of Massachusetts, and many other distinguished persons. 

At the King's Chapel the funeral-services were performed, and the remains were 
then escorted to the cemetery at Mount Auburn, where, after the final ceremonies, 
they were interred. 



ADDRESSES 



Death of Charles Sumner. 



IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, 
Monday, April 27, 1874. 



Rev. Byron Sunderland, D. D., Chaplain of the Senate, offered 
the following 



Almighty and Everlasting God, on this day of solemn conference 
we come to bow before Thee in deep humility, for the memory of the 
distinguished dead of this Senate comes freshly before us now ; the 
shadow of life's great mystery still lingers here; and sacred and melt- 
ing thoughts are in the air around us, and kindly voices seem to be 
telling us of the tokens and admonitions of Thy will. O, may the 
vacant place and this solemn pause in this Chamber to-day impress 
their rightful lessons on every heart, for great and small are all alike 
before Thee, and men from every station must go the way of all the 
earth ; Thou only remainest the same and Thy years fail not; and so, 
O, Lord God, we pray that we may all live and all die in Thee. Have 
Thou the charge of these services to-day; have Thou the charge of 
all these Thy servants, and of all men ; and grant that we may be 
prepared, when this life is over, to see Thy face in peace. Through 
Jesus Christ. Amen. 



ADDRESS OF MR. 15 OUT WELL ON THE 



Address of Mr. Boutwell, of Massachusetts. 

Mr. President, agreeably to notice already given, I now submit 
to the Senate two resolutions designed to furnish an opportunity for 
the Senate and House of Representatives to offer appropriate tributes 
to the character and public services of Charles Sumner, and I ask 
for their present consideration. 

The Chief Clerk read the resolutions, as follows : 

Resolved by the Senate, That, as an additional mark of respect to 
the memory of Charles Sumner, long a Senator from Massachu- 
setts, business be now suspended, that the friends and associates of 
the deceased may pay fitting tribute to his public and private vir- 
tues. 

Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate communicate these 
resolutions to the House of Representatives. 

The resolutions were adopted unanimously. 

Mr. President, the time that has passed since the death of Mr. 
Sumner has assuaged the bitterness of our grief, but the first feeling 
of sadness rests with undiminished weight upon every heart. Here 
and by us, more than elsewhere and by others, his presence will be 
missed. For nearly twenty-three years he was a member of the Sen- 
ate, and for a considerable period its senior. 

To all of us he was an acquaintance, and to many of us an inti- 
mate friend. 

To the cultivated classes of Europe and America he was known 
as a ripe scholar, a sincere philanthropist, an ardent and consistent 
lover of liberty and defender of the right, an experienced statesman, 
trained especially in English and American constitutional history, and 
the traditions, genius, and practice of European and American diplo- 
macy ; a lover of art ; an orator fully equipped, according to the 
requirements mentioned by Cicero, for the forum in which his maturer 
years were spent; and, more than all, a man of pure purposes in pri- 
vate and public affairs. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



*3 



For nearly twenty-five years I enjoyed his acquaintance, and for 
more than half that period his intimate friendship. Forgetting for 
the moment my relations to him, it is to be said that his friendships 
were first moral and intellectual, to which he added with a liberal 
hand the civilities, amenities, and blessings of cultivated social life. 

He came to the Senate not only as the representative of the Com- 
monwealth of Massachusetts, but as the representative of an idea to 
which the State was even then already pledged. The men who 
supported him in 1851 were, with a few exceptions, his supporters 
in 1857, 1863, and 1869. Mr. Sumner was at times in advance of 
the people of the State, but in his hostility to the institution of 
slavery, in his efforts for its abolition and the reconstruction of the 
Government upon the basis of freedom, he never misrepresented 
Massachusetts. 

In the cause of liberty he was apostle, martyr, and finally con- 
queror. In this cause, and by nature as well, he was self-reliant, 
self-asserting, and aggressive, and, therefore, his life, as he often 
said, was a life of controversy. His nature was imperious, he made 
little allowance for the diversities among men, and often he dealt 
harshly with those who opposed or failed to accept his views. It is, 
however, a happy memory for his friends and countrymen that after 
his return from Europe he had only kind words for all, even for 
those with whom he had most differed upon personal and public 
questions. 

First of all, Mr. Sumner was devoted to liberty ; not to English 
liberty or to American liberty, but to liberty. He accepted, in their 
fullest meaning, the words of Kossuth, " Liberty is Liberty, as God 
is God." 

In his efforts to establish liberty in America he gave a free con- 
struction to the original Constitution for the purpose of securing right 
and justice to all who were within its jurisdiction; and the powers of 
a constitution may well be construed liberally in the cause of right 



14 ADDRESS OF MR. BOUTWELL ON THE 

and justice, but they can never be too much circumscribed in the 
service of wrong and oppression. 

There are limitations to every form of human greatness. Mr. 

Sumner was a follower of ideas. A general declaration is the fullest 

* 

expression of ideas ; and Mr. Sumner was inclined to trust general 
declarations, and to embody them in the Constitution and laws. 
Institutions, indeed, are often unsatisfactory when tested by the 
ideas they are designed to represent. 

I speak rather of what has been than of our hopes of the future. 
Our own Constitution is now a near approach to the Declaration of 
Independence, and we may anticipate the time when local govern- 
ments and independent nations, in the discharge of their duties and 
the exercise of their powers, will conform practically to the best ideas 
of justice and peace. Mr. Sumner was impatient of delay, and 
hence he accepted reluctantly those amendments to the Constitution 
which to others seemed sufficient for the protection of personal and 
public rights. It is, therefore, to be admitted that in the business of 
government, and for the time in which he lived, Mr. Sumner was not 
always a practical statesman. 

The world is usually too busy to concern itself with the men of the 
past unless they have special claims to consideration. The immortal 
few in politics and government are those who have led in proceed- 
ings in which men of all times are interested. The American Revo- 
lution gave a few such names to the country and the world; the 
contest for the overthrow of slavery added others. Among these we 
may venture to place Charles Sumner, whose labors, fidelity, and 
sufferings can never be omitted from the history of the contest. 

As the influence of that contest widens and deepens in the current 
of universal human life, the services of the men engaged in it will be 
more appreciated throughout the world. The blow struck at slavery 
in America will prove as effectual against slavery in every other coun- 
try. While slavery existed with us, and suffrage was limited, and the 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



r 5 



truths of the Declaration of Independence were not realized in the 
Government, monarchies and aristocracies had a defense in the ad- 
mitted failure of the great Republic. That defense is now taken 
away, and, one after another, personal and class governments must 
fall. Thus will Mr. Sumner justly claim consideration in other lands 
and from future times. 

There is, however, an immortality not personal which is even more 
enduring. The power of a great life, of a superior human intellect, 
spreads far beyond the knowledge of names, and is transmitted to 
generations that have no means of tracing the influences to their 
source. These influences become woven into the civilization, lit- 
erature, and politics of nations, control their fortunes, shape their 
destinies, and work out good or evil results of the most important 
character. 

It cannot be denied that in the efforts made by Mr. Sumner in 
behalf of human liberty and universal peace he has given new force 
to the most benign influences, or that his power, mingled with numer- 
ous other contributions of the past, present, and the future, will con- 
tribute to the general welfare of the human race. 

But whether his name be remembered or forgotten, his power will 
continue. When a person has disappeared from the stage of human 
action, his name, even if known to future generations, is of little con- 
sequence to them; the influence of his life is all of value that remains. 
Thus has Mr. Sumner bound himself to his countrymen of two 
races, and to the civilized world, by cords that may be traced through 
the ages as long as justice shall find defenders or the divine spirit of 
liberty shall animate mankind. 

But these thoughts relate to the uncertain future. We are called 
in the present to accept the solemn truth that the death of Charles 
Sumner is a signal loss to the Senate and people of the United States, 
alleviated in some degree by the belief that his life, character, and 
public services, especially in favor of human liberty and universal 



peace, will ever be held in grateful remembrance by his countrymen, 
and the knowledge thereof transmitted to posterity as an example 
for future generations. 



Address of ^Mr. Jhurman, of pHio. 

Mr. President, my personal acquaintance with Charles Sumner 
began a few days after I took my seat in the Senate five years ago. 
It soon ripened into relations approaching intimacy, and a personal 
friendship resulted that was never marred for a moment by any polit- 
ical differences, however great and decided. Therefore it is that I 
speak to-day; and speak not so much of the politician or statesman 
as of the man. I leave to those who coincided with him in public 
affairs to delineate his public services in such terms as to them seems 
just. I offer a humble tribute to his personal character. 

It appears to me that one of the most striking peculiarities of Mr. 
Sumner's mind was breadth rather than accuracy; a predominance of 
the ideal over the practical; a devotion to a great idea without due 
regard to its unavoidable limitations. That this intellectual bent 
sometimes led him to overlook what should have been seen, to dis- 
regard obstacles that a more practical man would have felt bound to 
respect, to advance theories that, however beautiful in the abstract, 
were hedged about by limitations in the concrete, and often made 
him — especially upon constitutional and legal questions — an inexact 
and inconclusive reasoner, must be admitted, I think, by even his most 
ardent admirers. Who of us has forgotten how he, in effect, placed 
the Declaration of Independence above the Constitution, and de- 
duced from it powers of government that no one but himself ever 
thought were conferred by the fundamental law? Who can forget 
his immeasurable demands upon Great Britain by reason of her con- 
duct during our civil war? Who does not remember his oft-repeated 



idea that the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf should be 

wholly abandoned to the African race? But in all these and other 

instances that might be named his views, however impracticable they 

seemed to others, were in accordance with a lofty ideal that was 

satisfactory to himself, and from which he would not willingly depart. 

Another trait of Mr. Sumner was his love of discussion. He never 

within my knowledge shrunk from it; and he was the determined 

opponent of all attempts to limit debate in the Senate by a previous 

question or other restrictive rule. He spoke often and elaborately 

himself, and he was the best, and perhaps the most courteous, listener 

among us to the speeches of others. He placed a very high estimate 

upon the power and effect of discussion, often in conversation citing 

instances of measures being carried or defeated by a thorough debate. 

And it so happens that the last words he ever spoke to me (just after 

an adverse vote on a bill he had opposed) were these: "Thurman, 

this is another instance of the good effects of debate. Had the vote 

been taken on this bill without discussion it would have passed 

almost unanimously." 

It is an old saying, that the foundation of politeness is benevolence; 
which leads us to contribute to the happiness of others and avoid 
everything that could give them pain. All who knew Mr. Sumner 
in social life will bear witness that he exemplified the truth of this 
saying. I never knew him in a mixed company to introduce any 
topic that might prove disagreeable to any one present; and when, by 
inadvertence or otherwise, such a topic was introduced by others, he 
was always one of the first to divert the conversation to some other 
subject. And I can bear witness that he could sit down with a polit- 
ical opponent and discuss political questions, upon which they differed 
most widely, without for a single moment losing his temper or mani- 
festing a want of respect for the views of his adversary. This, in my 
opinion, Mr. President, deserves to be ranked among the virtues; and 
when we add that in the conversation of the deceased there never 



ADDRESS OF MR. THURMAN ON THE 



was anything low or vulgar, but, on the contrary, intellect, refinement, 
and taste marked all that was said, we contemplate a character whose 
amiability, high breeding, and politeness will ever command our 
respect and admiration. 

It has been very common to say that Mr. Sumner was an egotist, 
and this I suppose is the popular opinion. It may be true that, tried 
by the standard of modern manners, he was egotistical; but tried by 
that ancient standard with which his learning had made him so 
familiar, compared for example with Demosthenes or Cicero, he was 
a modest man. I must say that in five years of somewhat intimate 
acquaintance I never knew him offensively egotistical. That he 
found pleasure in speaking of the part he had borne in public affairs 
is undoubtedly true; but what man ever lived who had been long in 
public life, and who had arrived at that age when retrospection 
becomes a habit of the mind, who did not often speak of himself and 
of what he had said and done? If we listen with pleasure and 
respect to the aged veteran who — 

"Shoulders his crutch, and shows how fields were won," 

why should we censure the aged statesman who recounts his great 
exploits and narrates his hard-earned victories ? 

I apprehend, however, that it was egoism rather than egotism of 
which his critics meant to accuse the deceased. But what man ever 
achieved success in a long struggle against formidable opposition, or 
adverse circumstances, without some confidence in his own powers? 
And if this confidence, fed by success, becomes inordinate, what does 
it prove save that even the greatest intellects are not free from imper- 
fections ? 

Mr. President, there is a proverb almost as old as mortuary mon- 
uments, that describes an improbable story as being "false as an 
epitaph." And so of funeral orations it has often been said, that the 
quality by which they are most distinguished is exaggeration. Ob- 
serving the charitable maxim, " nil mortals nisi bonum" the faults of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



l 9 



the dead are buried out of sight; while, on the other hand, disregard- 
ing that other maxim, " nil mortuis nisi verum," he is exalted by eulogy- 
above the lot of humanity and placed in the ranks of angels or gods. 
This was not the idea of what a funeral discourse should be in the 
opinion of Charles Sumner. In that most touching and beautiful 
address delivered by him on the occasion of the death of Senator 
Davis, of Kentucky, while paying the highest tribute to the virtues 
of the deceased, and recognizing the moderation of judgment upon 
the character of our adversaries that is begotten by time and experi- 
ence, he yet stood fast by his own well-settled convictions. Following 
that example, I speak over his grave my belief, that he was great in 
intellect, profound in learning, sincere in his convictions, true in his 
friendships, urbane and amiable in his intercourse, and wholly unas- 
sailable by corruption. All this I can truly say, and more than this 
he would not, if living, wish me to say. He would not ask me to 
surrender my well-matured opinions, or to applaud his views or his 
course when they were opposed to the deliberate judgment of my 
own mind. 



Address of Mr. Spencer, of Alabama. 

Mr. President, having been honored with the confidence and 
friendship of the late distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, I 
esteem it a high privilege to offer a modest tribute to his memory and 
worth. Deferring to his large experience in national affairs, and ap- 
preciating the extent of his culture and learning, I have often, in the 
hour of need and uncertainty, sought his advice, and never in vain. 
To his generous sympathy and wise counsel I attribute much that I 
have been enabled to accomplish toward the happiness and well- 
being of a large class of citizens of the State of Alabama, once bond 
but now free. In their name and on their behalf, as well as my own, 



I lay the garland of gratitude upon the bier of Charles Sumner, 
one of the greatest of the many great tribunes of Massachusetts. 

When these bondmen were dumb, and in their behalf men were 
silent, he spoke ; and they can never cease to honor him who found 
voice for the voiceless and gave help to the helpless. That voice was 
never silenced in their behalf until there fell upon it the enforced 
silence of death- nor can they ever forget that the last dying utter- 
ance of their great champion was a whispered plea to cherish their 
cause. 

Now, when their tongues are unloosed, and all men may speak for 
them, in God's fit providence, his voice alone is silent. Yet how true 
it is that, "being dead, he speaketh." Not because of his scholarship 
do these grateful freedmen honor this great scholar; not because of 
his statesmanship do they revere the memory of this dead Senator; 
not for his acquisitions of learning, nor for his pride of place, but 
only that he had pity for their sorrows, and found it in his heart to 
plead ever for the poor and for the oppressed. His career thus fur- 
nishes an illustrious example of the truth of the proverb, "The heart 
of the wise teacheth his mouth, and addeth learning to his lips." 

Called from his post of duty in the acme of his usefulness, he lived 
to that epoch when to advocate the cause of universal freedom left 
no taint upon name and fame, and when to beseech succor for the 
oppressed and down-trodden constituted no crime, inviting and 
extenuating violence, or palliating denunciation and social ostracism. 
In the very face of contumely and disdain he calmly, but no less 
determinedly, waged his battle against the oppressor's wrong, gather- 
ing strength from every repulse and honor from every defeat, until 
the victory was won ; a conquest in the simple interests of peace and 
human happiness, with no aggrandizement other than the enlarge- 
ment of the area of freedom. 

During the period of African slavery, Mr. President, free speech in 
the Senate existed only in name — a precept without the practice — the 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



merest mockery of a privilege! The abrogation of slavery gave birth 
to many blessings, but none greater or more important to the 
American people than the right to freely express convictions on 
public affairs, and to be permitted to maintain these opinions in good 
faith, in accordance with the principles of republican form of gov- 
ernment. To Charles Sumner, as much as to any other, are we 
indebted for the practical and unrestricted exercise of the privilege 
of free speech in the Senate of the United States. The day has 
happily dawned when the argument of violence finds no favor in 
the public sight, and when the people recognize that through faith 
and love, and not by arms, can the work of national amelioration 
be accomplished. It is now the auspicious era of fide ct amore — 
7ion armis, and in this good work is Charles Sumner beatoz 
memories. 

Other Senators, more familiar with his career, will recall the inci- 
dents of his early life, his college days, his legal studies, his foreign 
travel, his friendships for the learned in his own and in other lands, 
his companionship with the wise and good — all that experience which 
resulted in the rare culture, and which made him at once the peer of 
the most cultivated, qualities which lent such a charm to his associa- 
tions and fitness to his surroundings. 

It is my purpose rather to speak of those virtues without which all 
these gifts and attainments would have been worthless in comparison. 
The lesson of his life testifies to the value of " integrity of purpose," 
that integrity which honors cannot suborn nor threats terrify, and 
which resists alike the blandishments of friends and the batteries of 
foes — vitain impendere vero. 

It was of little interest to the poor hunted slave whether Charles 
Sumner stood high in scholarship at Harvard; but it was of mighty 
import to all these dumb black millions that the scholar should have 
had the moral firmness to stand before the volunteer militia of Bos- 
ton, at a civic Fourth of July celebration, and deliver to those 



ADDRESS OF MR. SPENCER ON THE 



listeners (expectant of the glowing periods of the orator, to set forth 
the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war") his weighty 
arguments against all war! 

It doubtless seemed to the impatient politicians, during the weary 
weeks of vain balloting for a successor to the seat of Daniel Webster, 
that Mr. Sumner jeopardized a great prize for a very little and unim- 
portant matter, when he steadfastly refused to do the slightest action 
which even seemed in the least degree to compromise his position. 
But had he been of yielding stuff, of what worth would he have been 
amid the storms and strifes of the Senate ? His whole public life, 
from the day of that oration on peace, through all the momentous 
scenes of the twenty-three years of his senatorial career — years so 
crowded with events, years the most important since the adoption 
of the Constitution — his whole life is but a commentary and a repeti- 
tion of that rare courage which impelled him to differ from friends 
for the sake of truth and conscience. 

In those early days of bitterness, in these later days of calumny, no 
voice ever breathed a word against the spotless integrity of the man. 
To those familiar with the history of the times, there can be uttered 
no higher eulogy ! 

Realizing, in the very words of Mr. Sumner, that a "seat in the 
Senate is a lofty pulpit, with a mighty sounding-board, and the whole 
wide-spread people is the congregation," I am deeply sensible, Mr. 
President, of my inability to properly eulogize his greatness or to fitly 
exalt his memory. But I would fail in my duty to my constituents, 
and be untrue to the settled principles of my life, as well as recreant 
to the deep affection and veneration which I bore him, were I to 
remain silent upon this solemn occasion. 

Far be it from me to advert to error and frailty, and from which 
none are free; but, in his own language, employed in eulogy of the 
late Senator Fessenden, I may repeat that " the error and frailty 
which belonged to him often took their color from virtue itself." 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



2 3 



He has followed from this Chamber, in quick succession to the 
grave, the column of stalwart champions of liberty — Fessenden, Sew- 
ard, Chase, and Hale — all of whom, through the infinite mercy of 
Providence, were permitted life to reap the harvest of freedom, and 
to behold our land happy in the enjoyment of universal liberty. His 
motto was "Duett amor patrice" and no nobler epitaph can be graven 
on his tomb! 



jiDDRESS OF ^VlR. yVLoRRILL, OF VERMONT. 

Mr. President, here our numbers are not so large, nor our differ- 
ences of any sort so great, that we do not feel, when death enters this 
Chamber, something of the bereavement of the broken family-circle. 
Associated here for a prolonged term of years, often including the 
prime and ripest portion of our lives, statedly meeting in the work- 
shops of committees and in daily debate, hearing our names repeated 
in the frequent roll-calls, it is not strange that it should give our hearts 
a pang to part with the humblest name when it passes away forever 
to the "starry court of eternity." But now when we part with a con- 
spicuous member of the Senate, conspicuous by length of service, by 
eminent ability, and established renown, each one of us must confess 
to more or less of a personal loss as well as to the greater loss of the 
Senate itself. Charles Sumner, under the higher law, has responded 
to the last roll-call, and here the familiar sound of his voice is forever 
silenced. His imposing presence on the crowning outer circle of the 
Senate will no longer attract attention. Only the memory remains 
to us of one whose words and bearing, with minor qualifications, so 
well comported with the dignity of his office as to have fairly earned 
the title of a model Senator. 

Mr. Sumner for four years had been a member of the Senate when 
it was my fortune, in 1855, first to hold a seat in the House of Rep- 
resentatives. For words spoken in debate, in 1856, he was brutally 



24 ADDRESS OF MR. MORRILL ON THE 



assaulted by Preston S. Brooks, a member of the House, and it was 
not until after this that my personal acquaintance with him began. 
For some years I was more familiar with what was then known as 
his "vacant chair" than with the Senator to whom it belonged, who 
was abroad ready to invoke heroic remedies, if only they led to health. 
During these years he returned for a short period, but bore little or 
no part in the Senate. Mr. Brooks meanwhile suddenly died, as at 
last, and after intervals of painful suffering, has, also suddenly, the 
victim of his violence. It was noticeable in his social intercourse, 
while others let slip an occasional outburst of feeling as to his assail- 
ant, Mr. Sumner never disclosed the least lingering personal ani- 
mosity. History was silently left to avenge itself. His misfortune 
appeared to be accepted as one of the many inseparable wrongs 
resulting from the cruel system of slavery, with which only he waged 
enduring battle, and not as the crime of an individual, with whom, 
living or dead, he sought only peace. 

The Senate of the United States is no ordinary theater in which 
men sustain their parts. It is the forum of States. If the seat which 
in 1 85 1 Mr. Sumner was called to fill had been previously occupied 
by an undistinguished personalis task would have been comparatively 
easy, but that seat had been long held by one the world pronounced 
the foremost American Senator, made classic by one the breadth and 
grandeur of whose services, whose eloquence and statesmanship — 
with that of his compeers — had placed the American Senate on a 
level with that of the Roman Republic in the days of its greatest 
virtue and highest splendor. He succeeded, after a brief interlude, 
the veteran " Defender of the Constitution," who had stamped upon 
our banner the ineffaceable words, " Union and Liberty, now and 
forever, one and inseparable." To say that he proved not an unwor- 
thy successor of Webster, however unlike, is to say much, considering 
he was but a tyro in the politics of even the Commonwealth from 
whence he came. It was the fortune of Charles Sumner to be 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 25 

placed in his high station at a period of grand and rapidly-culmi- 
nating events. Blessed with exalted natural gifts, he also had been 
furnished with a large share of the erudition of the age, completed 
by such graces as foreign travel supplies. Having already started in 
the field with a small band of early crusaders against slavery, impelled 
by a robust frame and more robust will, he fearlessly seized upon 
every fit occasion in his new position to make that institution odious 
and, if possible, to wound it in some of its most vulnerable parts. 
This was his all-absorbing mission. 

He received and revered the Constitution of our country, as or- 
dained by the same will and power which proclaimed that great 
Magna Charta of human freedom, the Declaration of Independence, 
and therefore never forgot the fundamental idea of " equality before 
the law," nor that " all men are created equal." He brought no fixed 
allegiance to party-platforms, and found no withes in the Constitution 
that restrained him from resisting any claims for the protection of 
slavery; but that instrument was everywhere to be interpreted broadly 
and beneficently in the interests of humanity, world-wide and divinely 
free. 

Bestowing care even upon trifles, his orations in the Senate, as 
might be expected, were prepared as for a grand occasion, and, tow- 
ering in his place like a tribune of the people, the heavy, resounding 
tones of his voice were wont to draw the attention of willing listen- 
ers to words which soon found through the press a far wider accept- 
ance. His arguments were methodical, abundant in information, 
stiffened by apt and pregnant sentences, studiously observant of the 
syllogistic beginning, middle, and end, and, though rarely what is 
called brilliant or illumined by wit, were always clearly put forth, 
with the paramount object of spreading light and with the convincing 
majesty of earnestness. 

Those among us who may have found it sometimes difficult to agree 
with him never found it difficult to respect his fairness of purpose, 



26 ADDRESS OF MR. MORRILL ON THE 

his unflinching integrity, or his wealth of learning. In his orbit as 
a statesman he soared high from the beginning to the end, and ever 
sought with moral intrepidity noble ends by noble means. As to the 
largest share of legislative measures, he was apt to be right. He 
sturdily and sorrowfully resisted the banishment of coin, as an alien, 
from the base of a sound currency. Upon questions of popular 
rights he was often a leader ; in all steps of reform he was never a 
laggard. The doctrines he espoused, if not exclusively his own, ap- 
peared to belong to him by the possessory title of constant use and 
earnest adherence. He needed no admonition to "stick." If it 
cannot properly be claimed that " his doctrines persuaded one gen- 
eration and live to govern the next," it may be claimed that his early 
text of " Freedom, national; Slavery, sectional," did not wait until 
the next generation to be even more than verified. Freedom is na- 
tional and slavery forever extinct. In the surging conflicts in behalf 
of universal liberty the deceased Senator has gathered many laurels, 
and if few more remained to be won, his brow was already covered. 
He will be numbered among those who helped to change a great 
chapter in our history. By a life of unstinted and unselfish labor 
he secured the undying gratitude of an emancipated race and the 
general approval of mankind. 

Mr. Sumner Avas ever surrounded by books. They were his most 
beloved friends, and surrendered many of their secret treasures to their 
constant wooer. New books as well as old, Longfellow as well as 
Plato and Milton, often robbed him of sleep. He was a somewhat 
fastidious lover of the beautiful in art, busily collecting such notable 
objects as were historically rare, superb in material, or cunning in work- 
manship; but neither this elegant refinement of taste nor the epicurean 
seclusion of his daily life lifted him above willing labor and the ten- 
derest sympathy for those who were rude, unlettered, and degraded 
by even the darkest-browed slavery. To him the " Greek Slave" in 
marble appeared transcendently beautiful; but the chain, the ugly 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



2 7 



system, that chafed the limbs and bound the living slave, was an 
intolerable atrocity, even a manacle on the symbol of God. 

Mr. Sumner's habits of industry, though the sands of his fourth 
term as a Senator were fast running out, clung to him to the very 
last, and in no three months of his life were they much better dis- 
played, nor rest and pastime more habitually scorned, than in those 
which brought his labors to an end. 

Most men have some speciality wherein they chiefly excel, and 
doubtless the great subject of the natural rights of man most deeply 
excited the enthusiasm of Charles Sumner; but he brought valu- 
able contributions into the discussion of a wide field of topics, politi- 
cal and historical; and upon international law, it may not be wrono- 
to say, he was possibly more profoundly learned than upon the sub- 
ject which most contributed to build up and support his reputation. 
Few men have done more work, and fewer still have done it so well. 
While chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, in all critical 
emergencies he was a vigilant and powerful friend of peace, and as 
such merits the country's grateful remembrance. The principle em- 
bodied in our late treaty with Great Britain, of the arbitration of 
international differences, he eagerly accepted as the herald of peace 
to future generations, in harmony with his earliest idea of the "True 
Grandeur of Nations," and as a hopeful sign of human progress. 

Public men during life very often receive the poorest kind of 
thanks for their noblest efforts. The world at large is not always 
swift to comprehend; associates look on with torpid indifference; 
and enemies are made glad by every new field exposed to assault. 
But when the grave closes the scene, praise of the dead harms no 
rival, and the final verdict of history proclaims only truth, generously, 
perhaps, but free from detraction and all uncharitableness; and then 
public men who have deserved well of their country obtain that full 
measure of recognition and reverence which at last confers merited 
rank in the roll of the worthiest of mankind. 



28 ADDRESS OF MR. MORRILL ON THE 

The present age, however, always surfers at all points by contrast 
with the past, because none but the great among the unnumbered 
hosts turned to dust — the few screened and idolized products of 
picked centuries — have been preserved, while all of the present age 
are visible and so near that no deformities can be hidden. There is 
no sun, that has not long ceased to shine, whose spots remain unre- 
vealed. 

Our deceased associate, unsheltered by wealth, by family, or by 
party, was exposed first and last to much adverse criticism, from 
which, in spite of much real admiration, impartiality will not even 
now wholly release him. His persistency in pushing his own meas- 
ures to the front, though to their present hurt or to the hurt of others, 
often provoked rebuke. His enemies he easily forgave, but could 
not so easily bury the slender personal affronts received in any wordy 
encounters from his peers. - His self-confidence, admirable enough 
when he was right, was no less unmistakable and glittering when he 
happened to be wrong. To his conclusions, sincerely reached, he 
gave regal pretensions, and for them accepted nothing less than 
unconditional submission. Unconscious of personal offense, he im- 
periously, and with the stride of a colossus, trampled down whatever 
arguments stood in his way, not knowing who was bruised, and yet 
was sometimes so sensitive that if his own arguments were touched 
by the gentlest zephyrs of personal retort he felt they were visited too 
roughly. 

Yet these occasional self-assertions by no means held general sway, 
and never at his own house and table, where the cordial greeting and 
genial smile, with conversation embroidered with both wisdom and 
mirth, exhibited the full and varied attractions of his head and heart. 

Finally, deducting whatever truth may demand — a stern deduction 
the deceased never omitted — the brightness of his fame will not serve 
to perpetuate the memory of any stain upon the absolute purity of 
his private or public character, and there will still remain the imper- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 29 



ishable records of a memorable career — something that the highest 
ambition aims to grasp, and that heroes die to obtain — or much of 
the real elements of greatness and all the glory of a historic name. 

" I live in the hope of a better world, a world with a little less fric- 
tion," are words I have seen attributed to the departed Senator. Has 
he not, with no duty neglected, reached that "better world?" And 
who of us does not sometimes pray for " a world with a little less 
friction?" 



Address of JAr. ^ratt, of Jndiana. 

Mr. President, I too would drop a tear over the new-made grave 
of Charles Sumner. Others who have known him longer and bet- 
ter have already set forth in eloquent phrase his wonderful endow- 
ments of mind and the moral graces of his character. I do not pro- 
pose to speak of these at any length, nor yet of the leading incidents 
of his eventful career; for his history is known of all. The press has 
already spoken with its myriad tongues to all parts of this widely- 
extended country. Nor yet do I care to dwell upon that rare scholar- 
ship which made him, in international law, in belles-lettres, and 
statesmanship, one of the foremost men of the country and the 
age. All who knew him can bear witness how well the graces of his 
mind harmonized with his nobility of form and majesty of feature. 
He was a man of such mark in his mere exterior as to arrest at once 
the attention of a stranger, and make him a chief among ten 
thousand. All these topics I leave to other hands. But what I do 
want to linger upon a few moments are some traits in his character 
which distinguished him as a man and legislator, and deserve to be 
held up as incentives to others who would tread the paths of rTonor 
like him and win the enduring respect and confidence of mankind. 



30 ADDRESS OF MR. PRATT ON THE 

Mr. Sumner was a man pre-eminently true to his convictions of 
right. It was in this sign he conquered. He did not stop to con- 
sider whether the position he took would bring favor or reproach. 
He was only anxious to be right ; to plant himself upon principles 
that would not change. Hence he did not allow himself to look at 
a question through any medium that distorted its true proportions. 
He was an honest man by nature. He hated deceit, fraud, pecula- 
tion, and corruption in all their forms. But especially were all the 
strong forces of his moral nature set in hostility to oppression by man 
over man. Against the system of human slavery, he waged ceaseless 
war, from early manhood up to the period of his death. Need I speak 
of his correlative love of truth, of freedom, of justice, of equal rights, 
in this Chamber that has so often echoed his grand utterances ? To 
the establishment of this doctrine of equal rights among men with- 
out distinction of color or race; to the emancipation and elevation of 
the four millions of the African race whom he found in bondage and 
lived to see freedmen and citizens of this Republic, he consecrated 
the many years of his public service with a singleness of purpose 
that never swerved a moment, with an unflagging zeal and an energy 
that never tired. That was his great work; and it was a work of 
love and of conscience. He had many colaborers, and it is no injus- 
tice to them to say that he had no superior in the abilities, the ripe 
learning, the courage and zeal which he brought to the enterprise. 

The pioneers in the great movement against slavery were a most 
remarkable body of men, distinguished equally by talents and bold- 
ness, by zeal and fortitude. The history of parties may be searched 
in vain for a parallel to the anti-slavery party in its origin and prog- 
ress, in the short but rapid and successful career it ran, until all its 
objects came to be accomplished, but by means and instrumentalities 
hidden from the eyes of those who set the ball in motion. Their 
doctrines were odious to the last degree among their countrymen, and 
neither the great abilities of the leaders, nor the abstract justice of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 31 



their cause, nor the unselfishness of their motives could shield them 
from persecution, from odium, and contempt. The principles they 
announced touched the conscience of a part of their countrymen and 
alarmed the selfish fears of another part. They excited the animosity 
of all who wanted repose and hated agitation. The war they waged 
was against an institution which was coeval almost with the settle- 
ment of this continent, which was interwoven in the political systems 
of half the States, recognized, even, and protected in the national 
Constitution, and which furnished the unpaid labor of three millions 
of men, women, and children to promote the wealth and feed the 
pride of less than half a million of masters and mistresses. Never in 
the history of the world did there exist a combination of men more 
formidable by their common interest and their common fears, by their 
wealth and wide-spread influence, than this compact body of slave- 
holders; and it was such an institution, venerable in years, deeply 
imbedded in social and political systems, and above all formidable 
in the political grasp in which it held the country as in a vise, that 
this small body of reformers attacked in its stronghold. It was 
David with his sling going forth to meet Goliath with his spear like 
a weaver's beam. This is not the time to do more than touch upon 
that great warfare in which Mr. Sumner bore so conspicuous a 
part. He was most ably seconded by such men as Gerritt Smith, 
Lovejoy, Stevens, Hale, Seward, Chase, Garrison, Phillips, and Gid- 
dings. Most of that noble band of pioneers have gone to their rest. 
But what a work for a single generation to accomplish have they 
left behind them! 

When Mr. Sumner's conscience was aroused by the wrongs of 
slavery he was pursuing with singular success a profession which 
opened to his ambition pleasing vistas of distinction and ample 
reward. There is something grand in his renunciation of the advan- 
tages of his position; in his breaking loose from friends and a party 
too timid to resist the demands of slavery, and consecrating himself 



32 ADDRESS OF MR. PRATT ON THE 

to the elevation of a race of slaves, from whom he was so far removed 
by tastes and association and sympathy. I do not follow him in his 
great work. It is a part of the history of the country. To that coun- 
try and its honor, to truth and humanity, and to the cause of equal 
rights, he devoted the remainder of his life. His last thoughts dwelt 
upon that race for whose welfare he had done and suffered so much, 
and in the advocacy of whose rights he had been struck down by a 
felon blow in this Chamber inspired by the barbarism of that slavery 
against which he had made war. 

" See to the civil-rights bill; don't let it fail," were among his last 
utterances to his colleague in the other House, who stood beside the 
dying statesman. To his colleague in this body a year ago he said, 
" If my works were completed and my civil-rights bill passed, no visitor 
could enter the door that would be more welcome than death." That 
bill was the great work which was to crown his labors. It was the last 
act of legislation necessary, in his opinion, to fill the measure of the 
colored man's rights. How often during this session have we heard 
his voice in eloquent persuasion lifted up in support of this measure. 
It was the first bill offered upon the assembling of the Forty-third 
Congress, and stands to-day at the head of our Calendar of bills. In 
times past how often have we seen him employing every fair parlia- 
mentary opportunity of urging this measure upon the consideration 
of the Senate. 

Probably at no period of his life did he more forcibly illustrate his 
perseverance, his energy, his zeal, and eloquence, than in the many 
efforts he made to pass this bill. We know now it was no mere pas- 
sion for notoriety that inspired these labors. Death tears the mask 
from the face, and the human soul gives out true utterances as it 
approaches the overmastering presence of Him who divines the 
thoughts of men. We know now that it was in the heart of Charles 
Sumner, his last and most deeply cherished wish, to lift up the colored 
race to the plane of perfect equality. And, sir, while that race endures 



on this continent they will bind upon their hearts these last words of 
their friend, and henceforth for all time Mr. Sumner will divide with 
the martyred Lincoln the love and reverence of this warm-hearted 
people. 

But I must not forget to mention other traits of character which 
distinguished our departed friend. Though not a demonstrative man, 
but studious and somewhat reserved in his habits, he was courteous 
and kind to all who approached him. There was no one who better 
understood the rules and courtesies which govern this body, or that 
more scrupulously observed them. No one ever had occasion to call 
him to order. No expression unbecoming this place ever fell from 
his hps in debate, though no one more prompt to assert his rights. 

There is another trait on which my mind delights to dwell : the 
transparent purity and simplicity of his character. No one has ever 
ventured to assail the purity of Mr. Sumner's public or private life. 
Here, for more than twenty years, he stood a conspicuous figure, for 
much of the time odious for the opinions he held upon the subject of 
slavery and the object of bitter persecution; but who ever challenged 
his perfect rectitude of motive in the views he uttered and the votes 
he gave? Here, during the many years of his public,life, when cor- 
rupt schemes assailed Congress, who ever linked Mr. Sumner's name 
wnh ring or combination of any kind which sought special advantage 
from legislation ? No lobbyist ever approached him with doubtful 
propositions. No one could count upon his vote unless the measure 
was one which commanded his approbation from his sense of its just- 
ice and fitness. Suspicion fell from time to time upon many names, 
often with cruel injustice, of self-seeking aims; but it is a most strik- 
ing proof of Mr. Sumner's lofty and transparent character that his 
integrity was never called in question in his public or private relations. 
That he did not love money or seek to add to his riches we know 
from the modest estate he has left, and of which he has made such 
judicious distribution. That he had a warm heart and friends he 



prized, we know from the bequests he has made and the dying mes- 
sages he left. His last utterance was, "Tell Emerson how much I 
love and revere him." This was the friend who once said of Mr. 
Sumner, " I think he has the whitest soul I ever knew." That little 
sentence tells the whole story of Mr. Sumner's character. 

Mr. President, with this memorial occasion ends all of public honor 
we can render to our departed associate. But no living witness of 
what transpired here on the day his funeral obsequies were celebrated 
in this Chamber shall ever forget the sublime spectacle. From early 
morning all the approaches to the Capitol were thronged with people 
of all conditions of life who sought to look upon his face for the last 
time as his body lay in state in the Rotunda. What fitter place for 
such respect ? Thousands upon thousands passed his bier and paused 
a moment to gaze upon that classic face, majestic in the repose of 
death. And then who shall forget the presence which greeted his 
mortal remains in this Chamber? Here were assembled the repre- 
sentative living forces which govern this Republic of forty million 
people. The national law-makers were here from far-off Oregon and 
California; from the Rocky Mountains; from the original thirteen 
States, and from the great basin of the Mississippi and its tributaries. 
Here were assembled, in their black robes, the members of that august 
tribunal which administers jurisprudence over forty-six States and 
Territories. Here, too, came to do honor to the departed States- 
man the Chief Magistrate of the nation with his Cabinet councilors; 
and lastly, ranged side by side, sat the embassadors of the great powers 
of the earth, the representatives of those governments with which for 
ten years Mr. Sumner, as chairman of the Committee on Foreign 
Relations, had so much to do in molding our national policy. All 
these were here, hushed and sad, while the voice of religion was heard 
in prayer and in sad mention of him lying low in his coffin, all insen- 
sible to the imposing pageant, and about to be committed, with solemn 
rite, earth to earth, dust to dust. Sadly did his associates think of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



35 



that form, now prostrate and lifeless, as we had so often seen it tower 
here in eloquent debate. Sorrowfully did we recall that voice whose 
earnest tones should fill these Halls no more. And O ! how sadly 
did we see his lifeless body make its final exit from this place where 
for twenty-two years he was a living power, influencing in perhaps 
larger degree than any other the opinions of men. He has been 
borne from city to city, through the busy throngs of the living, who 
paused with uncovered heads to do honor to his ashes, until he has 
been committed at last to final rest in the soil of his native State, 
which he loved so well and served so faithfully. 

Mr. President, I cannot close my humble tribute to the memory 
of Mr. Sumner without adverting to the extraordinary testimonies to 
his worth which have been rendered spontaneously throughout the 
whole country by the press, from the pulpit, and through resolutions 
passed at public meetings. Since April, 1865, when Mr. Lincoln fell 
by the hand of an assassin, the country has witnessed no such mani- 
festations. But especially have these tributes been warm and earnest 
on the part of the colored race, for whose good he labored with such 
disinterested zeal. Wherever the news has penetrated that their great 
friend and advocate had fallen in the midst of his work in their behalf, 
they have assembled and given expression to their grief and gratitude. 
I hold in my hands a series of resolutions, just in sentiment and beau- 
tiful in expression, adopted by the colored men of the city where I 
dwell, and I cannot more fittingly close what my heart prompted me 
to say of our lamented associate than by sending to the Clerk's desk 
the preamble and resolutions adopted by them, and asking that they 
may be read. 

The Chief Clerk read the following preamble and resolutions 
adopted at a meeting of colored citizens of Logansport, Indiana : 

Whereas it has pleased the All-wise and beneficent Ruler of the 
universe to remove from our midst our beloved friend and benefactor, 
the eminent philanthropist and statesman, Hon. Charles Sumner; 



2,6 ADDRESS OF MR. SARGENT ON THE 

and whereas we, as colored people, are under a special debt of lasting 
gratitude to him for his unswerving devotion to the advocacy of our 
rights as an oppressed race: Therefore, 

Be it resolved, That the death of Charles Sumner comes to each 
of us with all the bitterness of a personal bereavement. 

Resolved, That we will ever cherish and honor the name of 
Charles Sumner, and that while we hand it down to our children, 
to be held by them in love and veneration, we will also teach them 
to emulate his virtues and uprightness of character. 

Resolved, That his solicitude for our cause, to which he had given 
the labors of his noble life, manifested in his dying hour in the ever- 
memorable words, "Take care of the civil rights bill," was the last 
beautiful link in a golden chain of good deeds which binds his 
memory to the hearts of the oppressed of all lands forever; and, 
though he needs no monumental marble to keep his memory fresh 
in their hearts, yet, as an outward expression of their gratitude, we 
favor the proposition that the colored people of this country shall 
erect a monument to him at the capital of the nation, respectfully 
suggesting the words quoted above as one of the inscriptions upon 
said monument. 

Resolved, That as a testimonial of respect to the memory of our 
deceased friend, we will drape our church in mourning, and the col- 
ored citizens of this city are requested to wear emblems of mourning 
for the period of thirty days. 



Address of Mr, Sargent, of California. 

Mr. President, it was my privilege a few weeks since, by your 
appointment, to stand with a few of our brother Senators at the 
grave of the late Senator, Charles Sumner, while his earthly 
remains were being deposited in the soil of his native State, to rest 
while time shall endure in the goodly company of heroes and states- 
men who had there preceded him. Standing among the tombs of the 
many who had trod the paths of glory that lead but to the grave, 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 37 

were the eminent men of the State, notably among others the masters 
of philosophy and poetry, who express its highest thought and give 
intellectual power and glory to the Athens of America. Only for 
such a man could such an assembly have been gathered. Something 
besides station evoked that homage of select souls. Among these 
many men of genius, drawn there not merely by respect for the dead 
statesman, but by the promptings of an affection springing from 
kindred tastes and years of intimate friendship, it may not be 
improper to individualize a very few of those who witnessed that 
closing scene of a conspicuous career. There stood Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, the genial philosopher, who, in writing of such friends as 
the one then mourned, had expressed in one of his essays his appre- 
ciation of friendship : 

" I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, 
the old and new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily 
showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace 
solitude; and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the 
lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my 
gate. Who hears me, who understands me, "becomes mine, a pos- 
•session for all time. * * * High thanks I owe you, excel- 
lent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, 
and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts." 

In that silent and sorrowful company also stood Henry W. Long- 
fellow, with silver locks and noble brow, the poet of tenderness, whose 
words had fitly imaged the aspirations of human souls to penetrate 
the veil of death ; words never more fitting than when some strong 
spirit has "left the warm precincts of the cheerful day" and passed 
beyond the dark curtain hiding from mortal gaze the " realm of mys- 
tery and night:" 

"As the moon from some dark gate of cloud 

Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light, 
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd 
Into the realm of mystery and night, 



38 ADDRESS OF MR. SARGENT ON THE 



So from the world of spirits there descends 

A bridge of light, connecting it with this, 
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, 

Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss." 

And there stood Oliver Wendell Holmes, the rich and clear in 
thought, whose muse is soon to celebrate his dead friend in other 
memorial services. Will he find more apt thought or expression than 
that with which years ago he testified his homage to the memory of 
a brother poet ? 

" Behold — not him we knew ! 
This was the prison which his soul looked through, 
Tender, and brave, and true. 

"His voice no more is heard ; 
And his dead name — that dear familiar word — 
Lies on our lips unstirred. 

" Here let the body rest, 
Where the calm shadows that his soul loved best 
May glide above his breast. 

"Smooth the uncurtained bed; 
And if some natural tears are softly shed, 
It is not for the dead. 

"Here let him sleeping lie, 
Till heaven's bright watchers slumber in the sky, 
And Death himself shall die." 

There stood John G. Whittier, the poet of freedom, datum ct vcne- 
rabile nomcn, sad witness of the interment of the Man for whom his 
exigent muse had called five years before the first election of Charles 
Sumner to the Senate : 

"Where's the Man for Massachusetts? 

Where's the voice to speak her free ? 
Where's the hand to light up bonfires 

From the mountains to the sea? 
Beats her pilgrim pulse no longer ? 

Sits she dumb in her despair ? 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



39 



Has she none to break the silence ? 

Has she none to do or dare ? 
O, my God ! for one right worthy 

To lift up her rusted shield, 
And to plant again the pine-tree 

In her banner's tattered field! " 

I could not doubt that the grand old poet had seen the realiza- 
tion of his ideal in the unflinching champion, now low in death, 
who had borne a part so generous and courageous in the strife for 
freedom. 

It has been assumed that Charles Sumner was an austere man, 
absorbed in his self-consciousness and in his daily labors, indifferent 
to ordinary emotions. I refer to the life-long friendship that knit 
him to men like these to show the real warmth of his nature ; his 
attractive and receptive inner life. 

I recur again to that scene, impressive as it was, as the uncovered 
multitudes silently looked upon the casket that enshrined the dead 
Senator, and fitting as it was that the State and nation should pause 
while the sad rites consigned to earth that noble form which had so 
long moved with high power and influence in human affairs, to note 
the lesson there impressed, that Death is the universal conqueror, and 
the lives of the greatest are but a point on the dial of time. To very 
few of the restless, ambitious, striving sons of humanity is immortality 
of fame attainable. The advancing shadows of the past leave uncov- 
ered few forms of men who have occupied the world's arena. The 
cloud approaches and swallows up successive generations ; obscures 
into common blankness names and histories that were fondly thought 
imperishable. Only when great opportunities are furnished to great 
talents can exception be hoped, or is ever realized. The efforts of men 
to accomplish the birth of some great state, filling broad pages in the 
world's annals ; an empire over the intellect or imagination of man- 
kind attained by the rare genius that dates its infrequent efforts with 
intervals of a score of generations ; the discovery or application of 



40 ADDRESS OF MR. SARGENT ON THE 

grand truths for the amelioration of human conditions — these may- 
give immortality to the memory of man, and leave his name a house- 
hold word even with the indifferent future. 

Charles Sumner's fortune did not cast him into an era when a great 
state struggled into being. He had not that impulsive, consuming 
genius that casts a glare over the ages. But he lived in an age when 
evils that were scarcely noticed, from their apparent insignificance, at 
the origin of the Republic had grown to vast proportions; had be- 
come incompatible either with national safety or human rights, and 
gave him a field of labor in which he became illustrious. Earnestly 
sympathizing with him in that work, concurring with him year by 
year in the blows that he struck at slavery, I speak with full heart in 
tribute to his courage, his manliness, his singleness of purpose, his 
high achievements. He boldly announced and persistently applied 
eternal truths that brought to the test the growing wrongs which 
were destroying the meaning of our institutions and giving point to 
the assertion that the declaration of the fathers was a display of glit- 
tering generalities. The name he earned by these labors of Hercules, 
Massachusetts cannot afford to let die. The enfranchised race must 
hallow it forever. But it belongs to the world and all mankind. 

I speak of his courage and manliness. Picture that almost solitary 
man as he stood here twenty years ago, uttering what his associates 
deemed not merely heresies, but blasphemies; the suggestions not 
merely of eccentricity, but of stark madness or fatal mischief. The 
ark he shook with unsparing hand was to them most consecrate. Here 
there was political and social ostracism — the discountenance of his 
fellows, so hard to bear in such a body as this; in the country execra- 
tion and contempt; at home, even, doubtful and hesitating support. 
Martin Luther would go to Worms if there were as many devils as 
tiles on the roofs. Charles Sumner would go where his convictions 
led, through obloquy, hate, unpopularity, and deadly assault. Let no 
man who challenges the wisdom or justice of his course deny his for- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



41 



titude and courage. But for the work that Mr. Sumner performed 
there were necessary not only fearlessness and fortitude, but a cool, 
clear judgment, untiring industry, and perfect integrity. Suspicion 
of sordid motives would have destroyed his influence. These neces- 
sary qualities Mr. Sumner possessed in the highest degree. His 
devotion to the one great idea of his life, the abolition of slavery and 
the entire political equality of all men, was absorbing and unremitted. 
If in the earlier years of his senatorial life to most of his associates 
here his utterances against slavery seemed sacrilegious or insane, long 
before his death advocacy of slavery in this Chamber would have 
seemed to all his associates as insane or a pleasantry. Less than 
twenty years worked this great revolution; and in this Hall he was 
unquestionably the chief inspiring cause and guiding spirit. The 
careful orations which he elaborated and here pronounced, exhibiting 
in remorseless nakedness the repulsive body of slavery, aroused the 
attention of the North, introduced into political discussion a moral 
element almost as potent as religious enthusiasm, and changed the 
issues widely from the commercial controversies that before that time 
had divided parties. It would be assuming too much to say that 
Mr. Sumner was the sole cause of the revolution that was wrought, 
mighty as his influence was. There were other able laborers in the 
Senate and in the country, increasing in numbers as events progressed. 
Slavery gave food for excitement by its measures of resistance, which 
were often carried to aggression, and by new demands; and it took 
the final stand in opposition to the Government, without which all 
the eloquence of Charles Sumner and his associates and all the 
aroused spirit of the North would have left it intact in its strongholds. 
The lurid flames of civil war let in a more intense light upon this 
great stage, and fixed the attention of mankind upon the actors who 
played a part unequaled in the world's drama. Among these Mr. 
Sumner was not excelled for sagacity or patriotism. I am disposed 
now to concede that the war was a logical result of the teachings of 



42 ADDRESS OF MR. SARGENT ON THE 

Mr. Sumner and his compeers; though only peaceful revolution, the 
force of persuasion only, was intended by them. They combated a 
power of unknown force and proportions; of unascertained sensitive- 
ness and vigor. They boldly thrust their torches into a magazine. 
They zealously promoted ends where the resistance arose from both 
passion and interest, and the collision was unexpectedly a convulsion 
where the frame-work of the Government trembled on its foundations. 
They believed that to circumscribe slavery within existing boundaries 
was to put it in the course of ultimate extinction. But its extinction, 
peaceful or otherwise, was not desired, would not be tolerated, by its 
ultra friends; and hence when a party triumphed with Charles 
Sumner's dominant idea, the friends of the twin relic took the fatal 
step of secession long contemplated as their dernier ressort. 

Mr. Sumner met this crisis with statesman-like decision. In those 
days, as a member of the other House of Congress, I had often oppor- 
tunity to listen to his utterances on the floor of the Senate. No man 
ever heard from his lips counsels for submission or unworthy compli- 
ance. Rather was he stern and aggressive, as befitted the times. He 
was among the first to proclaim that the war for slavery could only 
be put down by the annihilation of slavery. Where others of his 
party timidly followed or resisted, he boldly led. He was the em- 
bodiment at once of the convictions and courage of his noble State. 
In the prime of manhood and of his intellectual powers, hardened in 
grain and nerve by the long exercise of his strength in senatorial con- 
flicts, his decisive voice gave boldness and energy to the counsels of 
the American Senate, where only boldness and energy could cope 
with the appalling difficulties that assailed the country. To Mr. 
Sumner largely, to men of his bold and sagacious spirit wholly, the 
nation owes it that it is now not only one, but free, from the Canadas 
to the Gulf. 

Francis Lieber, in his Political Ethics, says: "The dread of unpop- 
ularity has ruined many statesmen, led authors to abjure the truth, and 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



43 



seduced citizens to crooked paths." With Charles Sumner no dread 
of unpopularity ever operated to deflect him from his chosen path of 
duty. He might err, he did sometimes err, in choosing that path; 
but he pursued it sturdily, without selfish fear of consequences. He 
was sometimes harsh in his judgment of the motives of others; but 
his own were transparent and frankly avowed. He was tenacious of 
his opinions in good or evil report. His reliance upon his own re- 
sources was unwavering; his confidence in his own convictions was 
supreme. He expected rather than courted the concurrence of the 
people. In a remarkable passage in the Memorial de Sainte Helene, 
Napoleon declared, "Thus we ought to serve the people worthily, and 
not occupy ourselves with pleasing them. The best way of gaining 
them is by doing them good." This teaching, however strange in the 
mouth of the august author, seems to embody the philosophy of Mr. 
Sumner's political life. Yet he was gratified by the love of the peo- 
ple of Massachusetts, and proud of their confidence. On the last 
day that he ever visited the Senate, when the resolutions had been 
read that testified that the people of his State by their representatives 
had rescinded the only censure of him that they had ever uttered 
during his long career of service, he feelingly expressed to me his 
appreciation of that great act of justice, and spoke warmly of the 
kindness that had cheered him during his last visit to his State. Yet 
it is said that to no man did he ever complain of that censure, and by 
no act or word ever sought its reversal. So he had none of the arts 
of the politician; had no party within his party; no leaders of cliques 
or factions at his beck; and left wholly to the people the care of his 
political fortune. 

It is meet that to the memory of such a man — scholar, statesman, 
and patriot — high honors be paid. He was himself generous of 
eulogy to departed worth. I have sought to add but a leaf to the 
garland that decorates his tomb. 



44 ADDRESS OF MR. SHERMAN ON THE 



^ddress of Mr. Sherman, of Ohio. 

Mr. President: When the Senate met on the nth day of March 
last, and we were informed that Charles Sumner was dying, the 
intelligence came with such suddenness and excited such sorrow and 
sympathy that no one of us was inclined to the discharge of his usual 
official duties. Mr. Sumner was with us the day before in apparent 
good health, and witnessed the formal withdrawal by the general 
assembly of Massachusetts of the only criticism ever made by that 
Commonwealth of any act of his during his long-continued service 
of twenty-three years as a member of this body. We saw no indica- 
tion of disease, and yet within twenty-four hours he was dead. So 
striking an example of the uncertain tenure of human life was a 
warning to us all, made more impressive by the exalted position held 
by Mr. Sumner. 

At no previous period of his life would his death have caused such 
general sorrow. The long strife he conducted against slavery aroused 
against him bitter animosity in one portion of our country, but this 
was so mellowed by time and events that his old enemies acknowl- 
edged the purity of his motives and the lofty purpose of his warfare. 
He had unmistakable evidence of the continued confidence and sup- 
port of his constituents, and of the love and veneration of five million 
frcedmen. 

The heat of recent contests in this body, unavoidable where 
debate is free, and where honest opinions boldly expressed necessarily 
produce some strife and personal feeling — this was passing away, and 
Charles Sumner was, by the judgment of his associates here, by the 
love and confidence of his constituents, by the general voice of the 
people, the foremost man in the civil service of the United States. 
This eminence is assigned him for unblemished honor, for high intel- 
lectual capacity, improved by careful study and long experience, and 
for public services rendered here with unwavering fidelity and 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 45 

industry, with conscientious consistency, contributing in a large 
degree to the liberty of millions of slaves, and to the advancement 
of the power, position, and prosperity of the whole country. 

We ought not to exalt the dead with false eulogy; but I feel, after 
long association with Mr. Sumner in the public service, continued 
since December, 1855, sometimes disagreeing with him and conscious 
of his imperfections, that I would not do justice to his memory did I 
not place his name and fame above that of all in civil life who sur- 
vive him. I do not compare him with those whose good fortune it 
has been to have rendered important military service, for such a 
comparison is impossible. We may contrast the services of the 
statesman and the soldier, but we cannot compare them. The 
mental and physical elements required for success are widely dif- 
ferent. In all periods of history the soldier has won the highest 
rewards ; the statesman must often content himself with deserving 
them. 

This is not the time or the occasion to analyze events or to parcel 
out the good that has been done or the evil that has been avoided ; 
but I can safely say that on all the vital issues that have arisen since 
Mr. Sumner entered the Senate he has been a prominent, conspicu- 
ous, and influential advocate of the opinions and principles represented 
by the republican party, which have either been ingrafted in the 
Constitution of the United States or have controlled the policy of 
the Government since 1861. His differences with political friends 
have been on collateral questions, but on vital questions he has 
always been not only a representative, but a leader. His part on 
the leading measures of the war and on those that grow out of the 
war is so conspicuous that their history could not be written without 
his name appearing in the forefront. The true criticism of his 
course is, that he has often been so eager in the advance that he did 
not sufficiently look to practical measures to secure the progress 
already made. 



If I am correct in the position I assign to Mr. Sumner, we may 
well pause a moment to notice the personal advantages or qualities 
that enabled him to attain this distinction. 

And first and chief of all I would place the advantage he derived 
from a good education. He was eminently an educated man, not 
only in the perfect mastery of college lessons, but in the broader field 
of classical and English literature, of international and civil law, and 
in the customs and habits of society. With this advantage, he had 
an armory of weapons and a capacity for acquiring knowledge from 
every source and of making it useful in every emergency. 

Again, he was a man of fixed convictions, with a steady purpose 
always in view. This is an indispensable quality for success. The 
central idea of his political life was hostility to slavery. This appears 
in his earliest writings as strongly as when afterward it became mixed 
with personal strife. His hatred of slavery was fierce, intense, mor- 
bid — evinced by such language of bitterness and denunciation that 
no wonder the holders of slaves construed his invectives against the 
system as personal insults demanding resentment. Mr. Sumner did 
not so regard them. His object was liberty to the slave, and not 
punishment to the master. His later life proves that when he could 
secure the one he freely gave amnesty to the other. Washington did 
not pursue his object to obtain liberty and independence for his coun- 
try with more unwavering faith and effort than Sumner did for lib- 
erty and equal rights for the slave. This quality in Mr. Sumner 
always relieved him from inconsistency. W T hile he was not always 
satisfied to secure what he had previously demanded, he was always 
advancing in the same direction and not in an opposite one. No 
man's actions could be more consistent with the objects he always 
kept in view. 

Mr. Sumner was aggressive; he could brook no opposition. He 
was always for a clean victory or a clean defeat. He would not yield 
even on minor points, and would often fight for a phrase when he 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 47 

endangered a principle. He would sometimes turn his warfare upon 
his best friends when they did not keep exactly abreast with him. 
This feature of his character lay at the foundation of many of his 
controversies with his associates, and was his weakest point. With 
the great multiplicity of minds that must contribute to a common 
purpose in this arena of debate, there must be yieldings of minor 
things to accomplish great things. 

Mr. Sumner was industrious to a remarkable degree. His seat 
was rarely vacant. He was prompt and faithful in his attendance on 
committees of which he was a member. Genius can accomplish 
nothing without industry. Education cannot be acquired without it. 
Success in public life more frequently depends upon industry than 
upon natural ability. We can have no eight-hour law or ten-hour 
law here. Mr. Sumner was always busy, and even in social life 
sought for or conveyed information. The eloquent speeches that 
will preserve his name are none the less valuable because they have 
been distilled by the midnight lamp. 

Mr. Sumner was honest in the broadest meaning of that good old 
Roman word. He was upright, free from tricks and fraud. No one 
could suspect the purity of his motives, or seek by improper means 
to influence his conduct. He might be misled by prejudice, or party 
bias, or local interests, but never by personal interest or hope of it. 
He was not a politician in the sense of the word as it is now used — a 
man of artifice or contrivance. He was remarkably free from all 
artifice. He did not even use the artifice of silence. But he was a 
politician in the true and natural sense. He was profoundly versed 
in the science of government. It is a common error that he confined 
his attention to the slavery question. Far from it. No one in this 
Senate was so familiar as he with all the laws and usages that gov- 
ern our intercourse with foreign nations. He was deeply interested 
in questions affecting the internal development of the country, and 
of late years has carefully studied all financial questions, and has 



contributed to their solution. Next to his dying wish for the passage 
of the civil-rights bill was his desire that the promise of the United 
States should no longer be measured by a depreciation of 10 to 14 
per cent. 

Such is the estimate, briefly stated, that I have conceived of Mr. 
Sumner. He sleeps upon Mount Auburn, and no word of ours can 
give him care or grief. He awaits the mysteries of the future, and 
not long hence we must in our turn join him. How changed this 
scene since a few years past I entered it! More than one-half I met 
here are dead, and only three remain who were then members of the 
Senate. Charles Sumner was the last of the funeral train. Who 
next? 

May we be so guided here that when our time comes our associates 
may be able truly to say of us something of the good that is this day 
said of Charles Sumner. 



Address of Mr. Wadleigh, of New j*Fampshire. 

Mr. President : Representing in part upon this floor a State con- 
tiguous to Massachusetts and a people closely allied to hers by 
many ties, I cannot refrain from briefly expressing upon this occasion 
the profound sorrow that bowed their hearts when they heard that 
Charles Sumner was no more. 

In common with the people of the whole country, they recognized 
his eminent public services, and, even when disagreeing with him, 
never lost their faith in his honesty of purpose and unfaltering devo- 
tion to the cause to which his life was given. But New Hampshire 
has other reasons peculiar to herself for cherishing his memory. 

Seven years before he came here to occupy the seat of Daniel 
Webster, John P. Hale appealed from the decision of his party to the 
voters of New Hampshire upon the question of slavery-extension. 



Almost single-handed and alone, against a party unequaled in disci- 
pline and ignorant of defeat, among a people nearly as steadfast and 
unchanging as their granite hills, he won one of the greatest victories 
ever recorded in our political annals. Kindling by his eloquence the 
love of liberty and hatred of oppression that lie at the core of hu- 
manity, he was borne into this Senate upon a popular torrent which 
burst through the crust of party like lava from the burning heart of 
a mountain. Here for four years he stood, the isolated and ostracised 
representative of a principle stronger than all parties and destined to 
triumph over them all. 

In 185 1, Massachusetts, as if to repay the debt she owed for the 
men who marched from the Granite State to die at Bunker Hill, 
placed Charles Sumner at the side of John P. Hale. It was the 
re-enforcement of a forlorn hope, and revived the drooping spirits 
of the opponents of slavery. 

What followed is known to all and will never be forgotten. Linked 
to the emancipation of four million slaves, the memory of such men 
is as imperishable as the stars. 

And after this marble pile shall have crumbled into dust and every 
existing political organization shall have been destroyed by all-de- 
vouring Time, Sumner's incorruptible honesty and steadfast devo- 
tion to the cause of human freedom will be gratefully remembered, 
for these make his one of the names 

"On Fame's eternal bead-roll worthy to be filed." 



Address of Mr. ^nthony, of ^.hode Tsland. 

Mr. President : I can add nothing of narration or of eulogy to 
what has been said, and so well said. Mr. Sumner's life, his char- 
acter, and his services have been fittingly presented, and on both 
sides of the Chamber. The generous voices of political opponents 



5° ADDRESS OF MR. ANTHONY ON THE 



have followed the affectionate praises of devoted friends, and nothing 
remains but to close this sad and august observance. Yet something 
forbids my entire silence, and impels me to interpose a few sentences, 
before the subject passes from the consideration of the Senate. 

My acquaintance with Mr. Sumner commenced previous to my 
entrance into this body, where it ripened into a friendship which will 
always remain among the most agreeable recollections of my public 
life. I remained associated with him until every other seat in the 
Chamber, except one, had changed its occupant, and eight new ones 
had been added. Some left us in the ordinary chances and changes 
of political fortunes; some were transferred to other departments of 
the public service; and of these some have returned again to the 
Senate; some, as Douglas, and Baker, and Collamer, and Foot, and 
Fessenden, fell, like Sumner, at their posts, and like him were borne 
to their final repose with all the demonstrations of public gratitude, 
of official respect, and of popular affection with which a generous 
constituency decorates the memory of those whose lives have been 
spent in its service and who have worthily worn its honors. 

But Mr. Sumner's constituency was the Republic, wide as its far- 
thest boundary and permeating its utmost limits; for he was conspic- 
uously the representative of a principle which, although seminal in 
the organization of the Government, was slow of growth and fruc- 
tified largely under his care. When the intelligence of his death fol- 
lowed so close upon the first intimation of his danger, it fell with an 
equal shock upon all classes of society, upon " all sorts and conditions 
of men;" it invaded with equal sorrow the abodes of luxury and the 
cottages of the poor — 

pauperum tabernas, 



Rcgiimqite turres. 

The scholar closed his book and the laborer leaned upon his spade. 
The highest in the land mourned their peer, the lowliest lamented 
their friend. How well his life had earned this universal testimony 



of respect, how naturally the broad sympathy which he had mani- 
fested for the wronged and the injured of every condition came back 
to honor his memory, it is not my purpose to enlarge upon. His 
eulogy is his life; his epitaph is the general grief; his monument, 
builded by his own hands, is the eternal statutes of freedom. 

Mr. President, when I look back over this long period, crowded 
with great events, and which has witnessed the convulsion of the 
nation, the reorganization and reconstruction of our political system; 
when, in my mind's eye, I people this chamber with those whose 
forms have been familiar to me, whose names, many of them his- 
torical, have been labeled on these desks and are now carved on 
the marble that covers their dust, I am filled with a sadness inex- 
pressible, yet full of consolation. For, musing on the transitory 
nature of all sublunary things, I come to perceive that their instabil- 
ity is not in their essence, but in the forms which they assume and in 
the agencies that operate upon them; and when I recall those whom 
I have seen fall around me, and whom I thought necessary to the 
success, almost to the preservation of great principles, I recall also 
those whom I have seen step into the vacant places, put on the armor 
which they wore, lift the weapons which they wielded, and march on 
to the consummation of the work which they inaugurated. And thus 
I am filled with reverent wonder at the beneficent ordering of nature, 
and inspired with a loftier faith in that Almighty Power without whose 
guidance and direction all human effort is vain, and with whose bless- 
ing the humblest instruments that He selects are equal to the mightiest 
work that He designs. 

And now, Mr. President, as a further tribute of respect to the mem- 
ory of our departed associate, I move that the Senate adjourn. 

The motion was agreed to; and (at two o'clock and thirteen min- 
utes p. m.) the Senate adjourned. 



52 PROCEEDINGS IN THE HOUSE. 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

Monday, April 27, 1874. 

A message from the Senate, by Mr. McDonald, their Chief Clerk, 
informed the House that the Senate had adopted resolutions for the 
purpose of showing an additional mark of respect to the memory of 
Charles Sumner, late a Senator of the United States from the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

The SPEAKER. The resolutions just received from the Senate 
will be read. 

The Clerk read as follows : 

In the Senate of the United States, 

April 27, 1874. 

Resolved, That as an additional mark of respect to the memory of 
Charles Sumner, long a Senator from Massachusetts, business be 
now suspended, that the friends and associates of the deceased may 
pay fitting tribute to his public and private virtues. 

Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate be instructed to com- 
municate these resolutions to the House of Representatives. 

Mr. E. R. HOAR. I offer the resolution which I send to the 
Clerk's desk. 

The Clerk read as follows : 

Resolved, That as an additional mark of respect to the memory of 
Charles Sumner, long a Senator from Massachusetts, and in sym- 
pathy with the action of the Senate, business be now suspended in 
this House to allow fitting tributes to be paid to his public and pri- 
vate virtues. 

The resolution was unanimously adopted. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



53 



/DDRESS OF ;VlR. £. JR. ^ AR, OF /MASSACHUSETTS. 

Mr. Speaker: When, more than six weeks ago, the announcement 
of the death of the Senator from Massachusetts was made in this 
Hall, the shock was so sudden, the sense of loss and bereavement so 
great, that we felt the most fitting employment of the time to be to 
" commune with our own hearts, and be still." Public business was 
suspended until that lifeless form could be brought to rest for a few 
hours under the great Dome of the Capitol, crowned by the emblem 
of that liberty at whose altar the homage of his life had been offered; 
and then, in the Senate Chamber, by Senators and Representatives, 
President and Cabinet, judges and warriors, the ministers of foreign 
powers, clergy and people, in the presence of the great reconciler, 
Death, were performed those funeral rites with which the nation 
honors those of her sons who have " fallen in high places." 

We bore him from these scenes of his public labors to the old 
Commonwealth which gave him birth; and there, in the home of his 
childhood and manhood, in the presence of countless thousands who 
thronged to unite in that last tribute of respect and affection, the 
State reverently and tenderly committed to the earth, to mingle 
with kindred dust, the earthly remains of her foremost public man 
and best beloved citizen. 

And now that his character and fame are passing into memory 
and history, it is fitting that we, his contemporaries and associates in 
the public service, should be allowed a brief opportunity to express 
our estimate of the man, and of his relation to his country and man- 
kind. 

Charles Sumner was born in Boston, on the 6th of January, 
1811, the son of Charles Pinckney Sumner, who was for a long time 
the sheriff of Suffolk County. His early education was at the Boston 
Latin School, from which he entered Harvard College, and graduated 



54 ADDRESS OF MR. E. R. HOAR ON THE 



with distinction in 1830. He studied law under Story and Greenleaf 
in the law school of that institution, and was for three years employed 
to take the place of Judge Story as a lecturer and instructor in law 
during the sessions of the Supreme Court at Washington. He spent 
the next three years in Europe, where both in England and on the 
Continent he formed the acquaintance and gained the friendship of 
many distinguished men; acquired a familiarity with some European 
languages; diligently pursued his studies in literature, history, and 
jurisprudence, and gratified as well as cultivated his taste for art. 
He returned to the practice and study of his profession, in which he 
gained an honorable and distinguished position, chiefly due to his 
profound and extensive learning. He never argued many cases, but 
conducted such as he had with marked ability and success. He 
edited the American Jurist, the twenty volumes of Vesey's Reports, 
and was the reporter of three volumes of the decisions of Judge 
Story in the first circuit. His first public performance which attracted 
general attention was his oration on "The true grandeur of nations," 
before, the municipal authorities of Boston, on the 4th of July, 1845, 
which Richard Cobden pronounced "the most noble contribution 
made by any modern writer to the cause of peace." 

He had voted with the whig party, but took no active part in 
political affairs, until the great controversy upon the question of 
slavery, especially as affected by the war with Mexico and the pro- 
posed annexation of Texas, brought him into the front rank of the 
advocates of universal liberty. He declined a nomination as a Rep- 
resentative in Congress. 

In April, 1851, he was elected to the Senate of the United States, 
for the full term succeeding that which had been held by Mr. Web- 
ster, and in its last few months by Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Rantoul. 
His election was made by a coalition of the free-soil party and the 
democrats; Mr. Boutwell, who was the democratic candidate for 
governor of Massachusetts, being elected by the same combination of 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 55 



parties. He took his seat in the Senate on the i st of December, 1 85 1 . 
His first great speech in the Senate was in support of a motion to 
repeal the fugitive-slave law, and was delivered on the 26th of 
August, 1852. 

He was struck down at his desk in the Senate Chamber by blows 
upon the head inflicted by a Representative from South Carolina, on 
the 1 8th of May, 1856, in professed revenge for words spoken in 
debate two days before. The terrible injury to the spinal column, 
which was nearly fatal at the time, resulted in the malady, angina 
pectoris, which at last terminated his life. In consequence of the suf- 
fering and illness caused by this assault, he was absent from his 
place in the Senate during most of the time for four years. He was 
re-elected to the Senate in 1857, in 1863, and in 1869; and died on 
the nth of March, 1874, having attended the session of that body 
on the day before his death. 

Such are the simple outlines of his life; yet how affluent a culture, 
how lofty a purpose, how rich a nature, how wide an influence, how 
absolute a conscience, how perfect an integrity, how enduring a fame, 
how tender and affectionate a heart, belonged to the man who filled 
out those outlines to the full measure of a noble and heroic character! 
The only office he ever held was that of Senator from Massachusetts, 
and when he died he was the senior Senator in length of continuous 
service. His successive re-elections were carried by great waves of 
public sentiment; without bargains, without concealments, without 
pledges, except those of his life and known opinions, and without 

competitors. 

For twenty-three years the record of his public life is the history 
of the country. He took part in all the great debates, and his name 
is indelibly associated with all the great results which that period has 
produced. And what accomplished results it was his privilege to see! 
How much of the great worked object of his life were attained 
before it closed! 



56 ADDRESS OF MR. E. R. HOAR ON THE 



When he entered the Senate there were but two others there of his 
political opinions. Before he died he was the leader of a majority of 
more than two-thirds of the body. He came there the advocate of 
impartial liberty throughout the land, the antagonist of slavery wher- 
ever it could be reached under the Constitution. He was treated as 
a detested fanatic, tried for months in vain to get a hearing, and was 
even refused a place on any committee, as ''outside of any healthy 
political organization." He lived to see the adoption of the thir- 
teenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, to 
be the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations, to see men of 
the proscribed color admitted to seats in both branches of Congress, 
and to know that he had the gratitude and affection of the race he 
had helped to emancipate, with the respect and confidence of the 
nation before whom he had pleaded that "nothing is safer than jus- 
tice," and to whom he had contended that "nothing is settled that is 
not right." 

His first public utterance was in favor of peace, and of the amica- 
ble settlement of differences among nations, which was contempt- 
uously received as the dream of a visionary enthusiast. He lived to 
see the negotiation of the Treaty of Washington and its consumma- 
tion in the arbitration at Geneva. 

Mr. Sumner was thoroughly and truly an American. He believed 
in his country, in her unity, her grandeur, her ideas, and her destiny. 
He had drank deep from the sources of American institutions in the 
writings and lives of our revolutionary fathers. He was an idealist, 
and trusted the future. To his far-reaching vision it was always true 
that — 

"Every gift of noblest origin 
Is breathed upon by hope's perpetual breath." 

His spirit was of the morning, and "his face was radiant with the 
sunrise he intently watched." He saw in the future of America a 
noble and puissant nation, its grand Constitution conformed to and 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



construed by the grander declaration of r 77 6, purged of every stain 
and inconsistency, the home of the homeless, the refuge of the op- 
pressed, the paradise of the poor, the example of honor, justice, peace 
and freedom to the nations of the earth. 

His personal integrity was so absolute that no breath of suspicion 
even ever sullied it. He said to a friend, "People talk about the 
corruption of Washington; I have lived here all these years and 
have seen nothing of it." He never had any tracks to cover up, or 
opinions or motives to conceal. 

You remember well his commanding presence, his stalwart frame 
six feet and four inches in height, the vigor and grace of his motions,' 
the charm of his manners, the polish of his rhetoric, the abundance of 
his learning, the fervor and impressiveness of his oratory. He was 
every inch a Senator, and upheld with zeal and fidelity the dignity, 
privileges, and authority of the Senate. He never seems to have' 
known fear. His courage and power of resolute endurance were" 
conspicuously shown in his undergoing the moxa, the application of 
hot irons the whole length of the spine, which his physician says was 
the most terrible torture he ever knew inflicted on man or animal, and 
which he bore without taking ether, because he was told that by so 
doing there was a little better prospect that the treatment would be 
efficacious. 

There is no doubt that he died a martyr to the cause of liberty, 
and to the efforts which he would not relax in its behalf, as truly as 
they who fell on the field of stricken battle. The bludgeon preceded 
the bayonet and the bullet in that civil war which began long before 
1861 ; and did its work of death as surely, if more slowly. 

Of his private life, of his genial and liberal hospitality, of the 
strength and warmth of his friendships, of his curious stores of in- 
formation, of his treasures of literature and art, of his tenderness 
and sweetness toward those who loved and trusted him, there is no 
time or need to speak in this place, on this occasion. But there are 



58 ADDRESS OF MR. E. R. HOAR ON THE 

many of the pure and gentle, of the thoughtful and richly cultured, to 
whom the tidings of his death brought tender and precious memories 
of these things. 

No doubt Mr. Sumner had defects of character. T think he had 
little sense of humor, and some more of it might have been of service 
to him. He was an orator, and not a debater; and if he had had 
more of the training of the bar and the popular assembly, might per- 
haps sometimes have made a more direct and forcible impression upon 
those whom he sought to convince, and who were wearied with stately 
periods and inexhaustible learning. But some of his faults were 
closely allied to his virtues, and to the sources of his power. He was 
of an imperious nature, and intolerant of difference in opinion by his 
associates, and has been called an egotist. But all this came largely 
from the strength of his convictions; from his own belief in his own 
thoroughness of study and purity of purpose; from what has been 
happily described as his " sublime confidence in his own moral saga- 
city." He was terribly in earnest, and could not understand how 
others could fail to see what he saw so clearly. 

1 1 may, indeed, be true that in advancing age, and while striving 
to bear up and do his work under a terrible burden of shattered health 
and worn nerves, he made judgments which some of us have thought 
unjust, and severed associations which some of us would have gladly 
seen preserved. 

But let me say for him that I believe he carried to the grave as few 
resentments, as little animosity, as rarely is found in the hearts of men 
whose lives have been passed in scenes of public conflict. I saw him 
frequently and familiarly during the last four months of his life, and 
wish to give my testimony to the gentleness and kindliness of his 
temper during all that time, and to the fact that he uttered no word 
of harshness or censure in my hearing concerning any human being. 
It was noticeable and touching to observe, it is gratifying to remem- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 59 



ber, and I think it would have been pleasant to him to know that it 
would be here remembered of him. 

But the time allowed me is short, and I must not withhold your 
attention from those who are to follow. 

I cannot better sum up the character I have described than by 
adopting language which has been applied to the character of Milton : 

"A high ideal purpose maintained, a function discharged through 
life with unwavering consistency; austerity, but the austerity not of 
monks but of heroes; incapable of depression, but also, as far as ap- 
pears, incapable of mirth." 

As I stood by the dying bed of him who was my friend for thirty 
years, and heard the repeated exclamation, "O, so tired! O, so 
weary!" the old hymn of the church seemed to be sounding in my 

ears: 

"Yes, peace! for war is needless; 
Yes, calm! for storm is past; 
And rest from finished labor, 
And anchorage at last." 

The weary are at rest! The good and faithful servant has entered 
into the joy of his Lord! 



^DDRESS OF JAR, J-AMAR, OF ^MISSISSIPPI. 

Mr. Speaker: In rising to second the resolutions just offered, I 
desire to add a few remarks which have occurred to me as appropri- 
ate to the occasion. I believe that they express a sentiment which 
pervades the hearts of all the people whose Representatives are here 
assembled. Strange as, in looking back upon the past, the assertion 
may seem, impossible as it would have been ten years ago to make 
it, it is not the less true that to-day Mississippi regrets the death of 
Charles Sumner and sincerely unites in paying honors to his mem- 
ory. Not because of the splendor of his intellect, though in him was 



6o ADDRESS OF MR. LAMAR ON THE 



extinguished one of the brightest of the lights which have illustrated 
the councils of the Government for nearly a quarter of a century; 
not because of the high culture, the elegant scholarship, and the 
varied learning which revealed themselves so clearly in all his public 
efforts as to justify the application to him of Johnson's felicitous ex- 
pression, "He touched nothing which he did not adorn;" not this, 
though these are qualities by no means, it is to be feared, so com- 
mon in public places as to make their disappearance, in even a single 
instance, a matter of indifference; but because of those peculiar and 
strongly-marked moral traits of his character which gave the color- 
ing to the whole tenor of his singularly dramatic public career; traits 
which made him for a long period, to a large portion of his country- 
men, the object of as deep and passionate a hostility as to another he 
was one of enthusiastic admiration, and which are not the less the 
cause that now unites all these parties, once so widely differing, in a 
common sorrow to-day over his lifeless remains. 

It is of these high moral qualities which I wish to speak, for these 
have been the traits which, in after years, as I have considered the 
successive acts and utterances of this remarkable man, fastened most 
strongly my attention, and impressed themselves most forcibly upon 
my imagination, my sensibilities, my heart. I leave to others to speak 
of his intellectual superiority, of those rare gifts with which nature 
had so lavishly endowed him, and of the power to use them which 
he had acquired by education. I say nothing of his vast and varied 
stores of historical knowledge, or of the wide extent of his reading 
in the elegant literature of ancient and modern times, or of his won- 
derful power of retaining what he had read, or of his readiness in 
drawing" upon these fertile resources to illustrate his own arguments. 
I say nothing of his eloquence as an orator, of his skill as a logician, 
or of his powers of fascination in the unrestrained freedom of the 
social circle, which last it was my misfortune not to have experienced. 
These, indeed, were the qualities which gave him eminence, not 



LIFE AND CHARACEER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 6l 



only in our country, but throughout the world, and which have 
made the name of Charles Sumner an integral part of our nation's 
glory. They were the qualities which gave to those moral traits of 
which I have spoken the power to impress themselves upon the his- 
tory of the age and of civilization itself, and without which those 
traits, however intensely developed, would have exerted no influence 
beyond the personal circle immediately surrounding their possessor. 
More eloquent tongues than mine will do them justice. Let me 
speak of the characteristics which brought the illustrious Senator who 
has just passed away into direct and bitter antagonism, for years, 
with my own State and her sister States of the South. 

Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, 
and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that freedom 
is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having- 
the outward form of man. In him, in fact, this creed seems to have 
been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a 
result of education. To him it was a grand intuitive truth inscribed 
in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny 
which would have been for him to deny that he himself existed. 
And along with this all-controlling love of freedom, he possessed a 
moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a consciousness which 
would never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from 
what he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were com- 
bined in him the characteristics which have in all ages given to reli- 
gion her martyrs and to patriotism her self-sacrificing heroes. 

To a man thoroughly permeated and imbued with such a creed, 
and animated and constantly actuated by such a spirit of devotion, to 
behold a human being, or a race of human beings, restrained of their 
natural rights to liberty, for no crime by him or them committed, was 
to feel all the belligerent instincts of his nature roused to combat. 
The fact was to him a wrong which no logic could justify. It mat- 
tered not how humble in the scale of rational existence the subject of 



62 ADDRESS OF MR. LAMAR ON THE 

this restraint might be, how dark his skin, or how dense his igno- 
rance. Behind all that lay for him the great principle that liberty is 
the birthright of all humanity, and that every individual of every race 
who has a soul to save is entitled to the freedom which may enable 
him to work out his salvation. It matters not that the slave might 
be contented with his lot; that his actual condition might be im- 
measurably more desirable than that from which it had transplanted 
him; that it gave him physical comfort, mental and moral elevation 
and religious culture not possessed by his race in any other condi- 
tion; that his bonds had not been placed upon his hands by the liv- 
ing generation; that the mixed social system of which he formed an 
element had been regarded by the fathers of the Republic, and by 
the ablest statesmen who had risen up after them, as too complicated 
to be broken up without danger to society itself, or even to civiliza- 
tion; or, finally, that the actual state of things had been recognized 
and explicitly sanctioned by the very organic law of the Republic. 
Weighty as these considerations might be, formidable as were the 
difficulties in the way of the practical enforcement of his great princi- 
ple, he held none the less that it must sooner or later be enforced, 
though institutions and constitutions should have to give way alike 
before it. But here let me do this great man the justice which, amid 
the excitements of the struggle between the sections, now past, I may 
have been disposed to deny him. In this fiery zeal and this earnest 
warfare against the wrong, as he viewed it, there entered no endur- 
ing personal animosity toward the men whose lot it was to be born 
to the system which he denounced. 

It has been the kindness of the sympathy which in these later years 
he has displayed toward the impoverished and suffering people of the 
Southern States that has unveiled to me the generous and tender 
heart which beat beneath the bosom of the zealot, and has forced me 
to yield him the tribute of my respect, I might even say of my admi- 
ration. Nor in the manifestation of this,, has there been anything 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



63 



which a proud and sensitive people, smarting under a sense of recent 
discomfiture and present suffering, might not frankly accept, or which 
would give them just cause to suspect its sincerity. For though he 
raised his voice, as soon as he believed the momentous issues of this 
great military conflict were decided, in behalf of amnesty to the van- 
quished, and though he stood forward ready to welcome back as 
brothers and to re-establish in their rights as citizens those whose 
valor had so nearly riven asunder the Union which he loved, yet he 
always insisted that the most ample protection and the largest safe- 
guards should be thrown around the liberties of the newly enfran- 
chised African race. Though he knew very well that of his conquered 
fellow-citizens of the South, by far the larger portion, even those who 
most heartily acquiesced in and desired the abolition of slavery, seri- 
ously questioned the expediency of investing in a single clay, and 
without any preliminary tutelage, so vast a body of inexperienced 
and uninstructed men with the full rights of freemen and voters, he 
would tolerate no half-way measures upon a point to him so vital. 

Indeed, immediately after the war, while other minds were occupy- 
ing themselves with different theories of reconstruction, he did not 
hesitate to impress most emphatically upon the administration, not 
only in public, but in the confidence of private intercourse, his un- 
compromising resolution to oppose to the last any and every scheme 
which should fail to provide the surest guarantees for the personal 
freedom and political rights of the race which he had undertaken to 
protect. Whether his measures to secure this result showed him to 
be a practical statesman or a theoretical enthusiast is a question on 
which any decision we may pronounce to-day must await the inevit- 
able revision of posterity. The spirit of magnanimity, therefore, 
which breathes in his utterances and manifests itself in all his acts 
affecting the South during the last two years of his life, was as evi- 
dently honest as it was grateful to the feelings of those to whom it 
was displayed. 



64 ADDRESS OF MR. LAMAR ON THE 

It was certainly a gracious act toward the South — though unhap- 
pily it jarred upon the sensibilities of the people at the other ex- 
treme of the Union and estranged from him the great body of his 
political friends — to propose to erase from the banners of the national 
Army the mementoes of the bloody internecine struggle, which might 
be regarded as assailing the pride or wounding the sensibilities of the 
southern people. That proposal will never be forgotten by that people 
so long as the name of Charles Sumner lives in the memory of man. 
But while it touched the heart of the South and elicited her profound 
gratitude, her people would not have asked of the North such an act 
of self-renunciation. 

Conscious that they themselves were animated by devotion to con- 
stitutional liberty, and that the brightest pages of history are replete 
with evidences of the depth and sincerity of that devotion, they can 
but cherish the recollections of sacrifices endured, the battles fought 
and the victories won in defense of their hapless cause. And respect- 
ing, as all true and brave men must respect, the martial spirit with 
which the men of the North vindicated the integrity of the Union and 
their devotion to the principles of human freedom, they do not ask, 
they do not wish, the North to strike the mementoes of her heroism 
and victory from either records or monuments or battle-flags. They 
would rather that both sections should gather up the glories won by 
each section, not envious, but proud of each other, and regard them 
a common heritage of American valor. 

Let us hope that future generations," when they remember the deeds 
of heroism and devotion done on both sides, will speak not of 
northern prowess or southern courage, but of the heroism, fortitude, 
and courage of Americans in a war of ideas — a war in which each 
section signalized its consecration to the principles, as each under- 
stood them, of American liberty and of the Constitution received 
from their fathers. 

It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, personally never to have 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 65 

known this eminent philanthropist and statesman. The impulse was 
often strong upon me to go to him and offer him my hand and my 
heart with it, and to express to him my thanks for his kind and con- 
siderate course toward the people with whom I am identified. If I 
did not yield to that impulse it was because the thought occurred 
that other days were coming in which such a demonstration might be 
more opportune and less liable to misconstruction. Suddenly, and 
without premonition, a day has come at last to which, for such a pur- 
pose, there is no to-morrow. 

My regret is therefore intensified by the thought that I failed to 
speak to him out of the fullness of my heart while there was yet time. 

How often is it that death thus brings unavailingly back to our 
remembrance opportunities unimproved; in which generous over- 
tures, prompted by the heart, remain unoffered; frank avowals which 
rose to the lips remain unspoken; and the injustice and wrong of 
bitter resentments remain unrepaired ! 

Charles Sumner in life believed that all occasion for strife and dis- 
trust between the North and South had passed away, and that there no 
longer remained any cause for continued estrangement between these 
two sections of our common country. Are there not many of us who 
believe the same thing ? Is not that the common sentiment, or if 
it is not ought it not to be, of the great mass of our people North 
and South ? Bound to each other by a common Constitution, des- 
tined to live together under a common Government, forming unitedly 
but a single member of the great family of nations, shall we not now 
at last endeavor to grow toward each other once more in heart as we 
are already indissolubly linked to each other in fortunes ? Shall we 
not, over the honored remains of this great champion of human lib- 
erty, this feeling sympathizer with human sorrow, this earnest pleader 
for the exercise of human tenderness and charity, lay aside the con- 
cealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and dis- 
trust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire 



66 ADDRESS OF MR. LAMAR ON THE 

to be one; one not merely in political organization; one not merely 
in identity of institutions; one not merely in community of language 
and literature and traditions and country; but, more and better than 
all that, one also in feeling and in heart? Am I mistaken in this? 
Do the concealments of which I speak still cover animosities which 
neither time nor reflection nor the march of events have yet sufficed 
to subdue ? I cannot believe it. Since I have been here I have 
watched with anxious scrutiny your sentiments as expressed not 
merely in public debate, but in the abandon of personal confidence. 
I know well the sentiments of these my southern brothers, whose 
hearts are so infolded that the feeling of each is the feeling of all ; 
and I see on both sides only the seeming of a constraint which each 
apparently hesitates to dismiss. The South — prostrate, exhausted, 
drained of her life-blood as well as of her material resources, yet still 
honorable and true — accepts the bitter award of the bloody arbitra- 
ment without reservation, resolutely determined to abide the result 
with chivalrous fidelity ; yet, as if struck dumb by the magnitude of 
her reverses, she suffers on in silence. 

The North, exultant in her triumph and elated by success, still 
cherishes, as we are assured, a heart full of magnanimous emotions 
toward her disarmed and discomfited antagonist; and yet, as if mas- 
tered by some mysterious spell, silencing her better impulses, her 
words and acts are the words and acts of suspicion and distrust. 

Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom Ave lament to- 
day could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable 
discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout 
this broad territory, " My countrymen, know one another, and you will 
love one another." 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 67 



Address of Mr. Orth, of Jndiana. 

Mr. Speaker : By virtue of resolutions just adopted, the ordinary 
business of Congress is temporarily suspended. 

We pause to recognize the presence of death in our midst, that 
mysterious power which walketh unseen, whose tread is unheard, but 
whose work is daily and hourly bringing anguish to some bereaved 
family circle. We pause to pay tribute to the memory of one of the 
most distinguished American legislators. 

Sumner is dead! His native Massachusetts, that good old Com- 
monwealth, mourns. Faneuil Hall is clothed in the habiliments of 
woe. But Massachusetts mourns not alone; her sister States are 
here to-day mingling their tears with her tears. 

His labors were not confined to his own State; his work embraced 
the whole Union. The cause of humanity throughout the world 
enlisted his active sympathy, and in every portion of our ocean-girt 
Republic, and in every clime where Freedom has a votary, tears are 
dropped to his memory. 

Those who have preceded me on this occasion have, more ably 
than I could, spoken of his early life and its reminiscences ; of his 
literary and professional studies and of his equal attachment to both; 
of his early success in the profession of his choice, demonstrating at 
once that if he had continued to walk in that path he should have 
attained its highest honors, as he subsequently attained the highest 
honors of statesmanship. 

A devoted student, possessing a strong and vigorous mind, enriched 
with scholastic and scientific research in almost every department of 
human knowledge— with him success was the certain and legitimate 
offspring of an effort to succeed. 

In 185 1 he was chosen to the Senate of the United States, which 
position he held thence continuously to the day of his death. Soon 
after being officially informed of his appointment, he addressed a 



68 



ADDRESS OF MR. ORTH ON THE 



letter to the legislature of Massachusetts, from which I present an 
extract eminently characteristic of the man, and indicating his high 
estimate of the duties thus devolved upon him, and the spirit in which 
these duties should be discharged : 

" Your appointment finds me in a private station with which I am 
entirely content. For the first time in my life I am called to political 
office. * * * I accept it as the servant of Massachusetts, mind- 
ful of the sentiments solemnly uttered by her successive Legislatures — 
of the genius which inspired her history, and of the men, her perpetual 
pride and ornament, who breathed into her that breath of liberty 
which early made her an example to her sister States. * * * I 
accept it as the servant of the Union, bound to study and maintain 
with equal patriotic care the interests of all parts of our country, to 
discountenance every effort to lessen any of those ties by which our 
fellowship of States is held in fraternal company, and to oppose all 
sectionalism, whether it appear in unconstitutional efforts by the North 
to carry so great a boon as freedom into the slave States, or in un- 
constitutional efforts by the South, aided by northern allies, to carry 
the sectional evil of slavery into the free States, or in whatsoever 
efforts it may make to extend the sectional domination of slavery 
over the National Government." 

He was chosen because the public sentiment of Massachusetts 
indicated him as a fit successor to her greatest statesman; and 
twenty-three years of faithful and distinguished service in the Sen- 
ate have fully demonstrated the wisdom of that sentiment, while 
throughout his long senatorial career his countrymen by general 
consent accorded him the once proud Roman title of '■'•Primus inter 
ill u sires." 

He entered the Senate at a time when his political opinions had 
few supporters, either in or out of the Senate ; when, to use a phrase 
of the times, he was " outside of any healthy political organization," 
and when ridicule, satire, opprobrium, and even social ostracism, 
were visited upon anti-slavery men. 

In i860 he was placed on the Committee on Foreign Relations, and 



on the 4th of March, 1861, became its chairman. This position, at 
all times one of great responsibility, especially so on account of the 
important and delicate functions pertaining to the Senate in connec- 
tion with the treaty-making power of the Government, became 
vastly more important in consequence of the rebellion then about 
being inaugurated. 

It is hardly necessary for me to add that his acquirements in the 
field of general literature, his thorough knowledge of the science of 
the law, and especially that branch pertaining to the " law of nations," 
qualified him in a peculiar manner to discharge ably and intelligently 
the duties thus devolving upon him. 

The war for the suppression of the rebellion involved the consid- 
eration of many intricate and important questions in connection 
with foreign governments, requiring for their solution the utmost 
skill and prudence. During that eventful period Sumner was on 
most confidential terms with Secretary Seward, and the distinguished 
Secretary and no less distinguished Senator were in constant consul- 
tation over those questions. 

The wisdom which characterized our foreign intercourse during 
this most trying period in our history, and the ability with which 
the rights of the Government were maintained and serious com- 
plications avoided, attest equally the importance of those consul- 
tations and the eminent statesmanship of these two distinguished 
citizens. 

In these labors he seems to have adhered strictly to those cardinal 
principles adopted at an early period of our diplomatic history, " to 
avoid all entangling alliances with foreign nations;" "to demand 
nothing but what is right, and submit to nothing that is wrong." 

His senatorial career attests that in no just sense of the term was 
he ever a partisan, but co-operated with party organization only so 
far as he believed such organization to be essential to the accom- 
plishment of his great purpose. 



•JO ADDRESS OF MR. ORTH ON THE 

That purpose, which was the leading principle of his life, was to 
secure beyond doubt or contingency " the equality of the human 
race," and with him it became the "star of his destiny," the "sun of 
his Austerlitz." He frequently expressed this principle sententiously, 
as " equality of rights is the first of all rights," " equality before the 
law;" and this purpose became a part of his very nature; as it were, 
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It was this which led him 
to believe and to act upon the belief that all men should be free; 
that freedom should encircle the earth like its atmosphere; that in 
every clime the chains of slavery should be broken, and that every- 
where man created in the image of his Maker should stand erect 
and unshackled, the peer of his neighbor, in the presence of 
God, who has so solemnly proclaimed that He "is no respecter of 
persons." 

The blighting curse of slavery clouded and tarnished, alas! too 
long, our national escutcheon. Serpent-like, it crawled into the very 
citadel of American liberty, and coiled its slimy folds around the pil- 
lars of the Constitution, infusing its poison into the life-blood of the 
Republic, and striking, as with the touch of paralysis, alike all classes 
of our people and every department of the Government. 

To destroy this monster was the enthusiastically assumed life-task 
of Sumner, engrossing all his thoughts, enlisting all his energies. 
To the accomplishment of this task he subordinated every other con- 
sideration, devoting to it all his time, his great talents, and his varied 
learning. His unceasing vigilance was equal to all the devices and 
strategy of the enemy, who, baffled at one point and retreating to 
another, was still pursued and pressed and scourged. He met bold- 
ness with boldness, audacity with firmness, and sophistry with the 
principles of eternal truth. The battle was long continued and often 
waged with apparently unequal forces, but Sumner faltered not; he 
had counted the cost from the beginning, and had an abiding faith 
that, with the God of Freedom on his side, complete and enduring 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 71 



victory was only a question of time; and, strengthened and animated 
by that faith, he was willing to bide that time. 

Victory came, as God willed it should come, amid war, and fire, 
and blood, amid the convulsive throes of a nation struggling for ex- 
istence ; it came while unnumbered graves were being filled with the 
sad remains of some of the best and bravest of our countrymen; and 
that victory is forever embedded as with adamant in the Constitution 
in these words of living light: 

" Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment 
for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist 
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." 
Thus was the monster slain; and amid his death-struggle, and his 
dying groans, four millions of the victims of his power rose, unshackled 
and unfettered, and with prayers and songs of thanksgiving praised 
the God of Freedom for their deliverance. 

Slavery was destroyed and freedom obtained, but Sumner saw that 
freedom was not secure without equality of rights, and he at once 
addressed himself to the duty devolving upon the statesman as an 
inevitable consequence of the recent struggle. This portion of our 
history is so freshly engraven on the public mind that a mere allusion 
to it is all-sufficient. The removal of odious disabilities incident to 
the law of slavery, the granting of civil rights to those recently eman- 
cipated, and the conferring upon them political privileges and fran- 
chises, were events which followed each other in rapid and natural 
succession. But these acts were not accomplished without serious 
and closely-contested struggles, for the prejudices engendered by 
slavery did not die with slavery, and in all these struggles Sumner 
was a most prominent and a most able leader. 

As "equality before the law" was the leading principle of his 
whole life, so it most naturally and fitly engrossed his dying moments, 
and almost his last words on earth were an injunction to a valued 
friend, "Take care of my civil-rights bill." 



J 



72 ADDRESS OF MR. RAINEY ON THE 

With such a life, filled with such deeds, is it a wonder that his 
death has called forth such universal regret and sympathy ? Is it a 
wonder that the colored man, whose cause he served so well and for 
whose rights he struggled so successfully, should be among the first 
at his death-bed and among the last at his grave? 

Is it a wonder that throughout the land the colored men should 
"regard his death with all the bitterness of a personal bereavement," 
and " owe to his memory a lasting debt of gratitude ? " Is it a won- 
der that in the lowly dwellings of the freedmen tears of bitterness 
should course down the furrowed cheeks of the former slave, who 
perchance was never permitted to look upon his face, but who remem- 
bers his benefactor and teaches his children to reverence the name 
and fame of Charles Sumner? 

Mr. Speaker, years ago New England's poet of freedom addressed 
to the memory of a co-laborer in freedom's cause words which can 
appropriately be repeated on this occasion: 

" O loved of thousands ! to thy grave, 

Sorrowing of heart, thy brethren bore thee; 
The poor man and the rescued slave 

Wept, as the broken earth closed o'er thee; 
And grateful tears, like summer rain, 

Quickened its dying grass again ! 
And there, as to some pilgrim shrine, 

Shall come the outcast and the lowly, 
Of gentle deeds and words of thine, 

Recalling memories sweet and holy !" 



^ADDRESS OF JAR. RAINEY, OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 

Mr. Speaker : Not long since we were called upon to lay aside our 
accustomed duties of legislation to participate in the mournful pro- 
cession that signalized the departure of the distinguished statesman 
and philanthropist who has been summoned before the bar of our 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 73 

final Judge. We have again halted to pay further tribute to his 
memory and intrinsic worth. 

The announcement of the death of Charles Sumner, late Senator 
from the State of Massachusetts, sent a thrill of sorrow and cast a 
shade of melancholy gloom over this country more pervading in its 
general effects than any similar event since the assassination of the 
lamented Lincoln. Language such as I have at my command is 
too imperfect and feeble to convey in adequate terms the high esti- 
mation in which he was held, or to express fully and feelingly the 
depth of grief his demise has occasioned. Men and Avomen mourn 
his loss and shed the tear of regretful sadness, not only in large cities 
and their palatial dwellings, occupied by the learned and wealthy, 
but in villages and hamlets, upon farms and the distant plantations 
of the South; into the cabins of the unlettered and the lowly be- 
reavement found its way, bowing the hearts of all in mournful lam- 
entation for this irreparable loss. Mr. Sumner, in name and deeds, 
is known, revered, and esteemed by all classes of our people. The 
remarkable and noble battles of argument and eloquence which he 
has fought in the Senate in behalf of the oppressed, have enshrined 
him in the hearts of his countrymen, millions of whom never beheld 
his majestic form, nor heard his deep and impressive voice — that 
voice which at no time indulged silence when the cause of the 
down-trodden and the enslaved was the issue. 

Early in life Mr. Sumner espoused the cause of those who were 
not able to speak for themselves, and whose bondage made it haz- 
ardous for any one else to venture a word in their behalf. No one 
knew the danger and magnitude of such an undertaking better than 
the deceased. Public sentiment at that time was opposed to his 
course; ostracism confronted him; friends forsook him; but, un- 
daunted and full of courage, he pursued the right, sustained his con- 
victions, and lived long enough to see the fruition of his earnest labors. 
He was among the first to arouse the Commonwealth of his beloved 



74 ADDRESS OF MR. RAINEY ON THE 

Massachusetts to consider the justice and equity of mixed schools. 
The blows he gave were effectual; the separating walls could not 
withstand them; they consequently tottered and fell. The doors of 
the school-houses flew open to all; prejudice was well-nigh consumed 
by the blaze of his ardent eloquence, and proscription gave way to 
more liberal views. It was upon his motion that the first colored 
man was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the 
United States. 

These remarks are made to show that the cause of my race was 
always foremost in his mind; indeed, he was a friend who in many 
instances stuck closer than a brother. He was one of those who never 
slumbered upon his lance, but stood ever watchful for the oppor- 
tunity to hurl the shaft of his forensic powers against the institution of 
slavery. The forum, the platform, and the legislative hall bear equal 
testimony to his untiring zeal and determined opposition thereto. 

The barbarities and atrocities of slavery, through the aid of his 
giant mind, were brought to the attention of the American people 
and the world in a manner and style hitherto unknown. He was 
God's chosen advocate of freedom and denouncer of the crime of the 
"peculiar institution" which blurred the fair record and threatened 
ultimately to destroy the growing fame of his country. So attractive, 
instructive, and inviting was his mode of argument, that even those 
who opposed him most strenuously were constrained to " read, mark, 
learn, and inwardly digest" his utteranees. This was doubtless 
owing in a great measure to his rare talents and acquirements, and 
the splendid opportunity he enjoyed of speaking to the country. 

Mr. Sumner was a patriot of no ordinary rank. He was a lover 
of his country, the whole country, in the broadest and the most com- 
prehensive signification of the term. Whatever he did to hinder the 
extension of slavery or to hasten the day of its final abolition, was 
based not upon hatred or antipathy to the South, but upon a con- 
viction that it was not only wrong to humanity, but an accursed blot 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 75 



upon the escutcheon of the Republic. He knew full well that it 
would tarnish the beauty of its history; therefore he felt the duty 
pressing to combat it. In a word, he did not hate the South nor the 
slaveholder, but he hated and detested slavery. His desire was that 
the South as well as the North should share in the real grandeur of 
this republican empire. He was aware that the impartial historian 
could not complete his task so long as slavery existed, unless the pen, 
as it were, was dipped in human blood; the thought of which to him 
was revolting. O that the South had heeded his admonition and 
let the oppressed go free ! As a statesman, Mr. Sumner may have 
allowed his zeal to outrun his discretion, and thus made mistakes. 

"To err is human; to forgive, divine." 

It was evident, however, that his errors ever leaned to the side of 
justice and humanity. He could not comprehend any fundamental 
law that did not embrace in its provisions the cause of the poor and 
the needy; consequently his construction of the Constitution differed 
in many essential particulars from that put upon it by other states- 
men, who were less liberal in their opinions and more partial and 
biased in their judgment. He was strong to his convictions, faithful 
to duty, and true to his country. How appropriate are the follow- 
ing lines in tracing his active and useful life ; 

"Stanch at thy post, to meet life's common doom, 
It scarce seems death to die as thou hast died; 
Thy duty done, thy truth, strength, courage tried, 
And all things ripe for the fulfilling tomb ! 
A crown would mock thy hearse's sable gloom, 
Whose virtues raised thee higher than a throne, 
Whose faults were erring Nature's, not his own, — 
Such be thy sentence, writ with Fame's bright plume, 
Amongst the good and great; for thou wast great 
In thought, word, deed— like mightiest ones of old- 
Full of the honest truth, which makes men bold, 
Wise, pure, firm, just; the noblest Roman's state 
Became not more a ruler of the free 
Than thy plain life, high thoughts, and matchless constancy." 



7 6 



ADDRESS OF MR. RAINEY ON THE 



Compared to his admirers, Mr. Sumner's circle of intimate friends 
was not very numerous. Only a few genial spirits imparted to him 
social pleasure and mental enjoyment. He found his chief delight 
in the companionship of books and the study of the fine arts. But 
with this rare appreciation for the classic and the artistic he possessed, 
in an astonishing degree, the faculty of adapting himself to social 
intercourse with those whose attainments were not commensurate 
with his own. He was always willing to receive such as visited him 
seeking counsel or advice, without regard to present circumstances 
or former condition. His friendship, when formed, was sincere and 
advantageous. I did myself the honor to call upon him occasion- 
ally, not as often, however, as I felt inclined, for I knew that his time 
was valuable, not only to himself, but to his country. Never did I 
call but I found him glad to see me and ready to lay aside constant- 
ly-exacting duties and engage in such conversation as invariably 
resulted in my being benefited. It was very perceptible that the aim 
and bent of his master mind was to elevate to true manhood the race 
with which I am particularly identified. I can never forget, so long 
as I have the faculty of recollection, the warm and friendly grasp he 
gave my hand soon after I was admitted a member of this House. 
On my first visit to the Senate he said, " I welcome you to this 
Chamber. Come over frequently; you have rights here as well as 
others." 

During his senatorial career, embracing a period of twenty-three 
years, he has contended for a moral principle against enemies more 
daring and intrepid, perhaps, than any other man has encountered 
in the same space of time. This principle was to him more dear 
than life itself. His conscientious conviction that slavery was a 
national crime and moral sin could not endure tamely assertions to 
the contrary. He heeded not the menacing denunciations of those 
"who eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence." 
Their execrations could not move nor intimidate him. Finding 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 77 

these instruments of wickedness could not deter him or turn the keen 
edge of his argument, he was brutally and cowardly assaulted in the 
Senate Chamber, in 1856, by Preston S. Brooks, a Representative 
from South Carolina. This occurred a few days after his masterly 
effort setting forth the " Crimes against Kansas." 

Mr. Speaker, that unprovoked assault declared to the country the 
threatening attitude of the two sections, one against the other, and 
awakened a determination on the part of the North to resist the en- 
croachments of slavery. The unexpressed sympathy that was felt for 
him among the slaves of the South, when they heard of this unwar- 
ranted attack, was only known to those whose situations at the time 
made them confidants. Their prayers and secret importunities were 
ever uttered in the interest of him who was their constant friend and 
untiring advocate and defender before the high court of the nation. 

Mr. Speaker, it is said that " the blood of the martyrs is the seed 
of the church." With equal truthfulness and force, I think, it may 
be said that the blood of Charles Sumner, spilled upon the floor of 
the Senate because he dared to oppose the slave-power of the South 
and to interpose in the path of its progress, was the seed that pro- 
duced general emancipation, the result of which is too well known 
to need comment. It spoke silently but effectively of the cruelty and 
iniquities of that abominable institution. 

Notwithstanding that dastardly assault, his valor was not cooled, 
neither was his determination abated to resist the advancing steps of 
that power which was the source of so much distraction to the Re- 
public and disgrace to the nineteenth century. Sir, I believe in a 
Providence that shapes events and controls circumstances. His hand 
is most conspicuously seen in the life and death of the lamented Sen- 
ator. Though he was a martyr to the cause of freedom and universal 
liberty, he nevertheless lived long enough to see the struggles of his 
eventful public life crowned with victory, and the broken shackles of 
the slave scattered at his feet before he was gathered to his fathers. 



78 ADDRESS OF MR. RAINEY ON THE 



The emancipated and enfranchised will pay grateful homage to his 
memory in life, and, dying, bequeath the name of him who was their 
benefactor as a befitting one for the reverence and adoration of pos- 
terity. 

" Farewell ! if ever fondest prayer 
For others' weal availed on high, 
Ours will not be lost in air, 

But waft thy name beyond the sky." 

Mr. Speaker, the intentness of his thought on the subject of his 
mission, for which, apparently, he was born, clung to him to the 
ebbing moments of his life. When weary and longing for rest, hav- 
ing his eyes fixed upon that "mansion not made with hands, eternal 
in the heavens," and just preceding his final step over the threshold 
of time into the boundless space of eternity, he uttered, in dying 
accents, yet with an eloquence more persuasive and impressive than 
ever, these words: "Do not let the civil-rights bill fail!" 

How remarkable the connecting incidents of his history! This is 
particularly apparent when we recall the fact that he began as an 
advocate of human rights, continued, through an eventful career, the 
same, and closing his last hours on earth, facing the judgment-seat 
of the very God, he looked back for a moment and repeated these 
words, which will be ever memorable, "Do not let the civil- 
rights bill fail!" 

This sentence, we trust, will prove more potent and availing in 
securing equality before the law for all men than any of his former 
efforts. This is not the proper time, neither is the occasion propi- 
tious, for further comment on that dying appeal. I therefore with 
trembling hands and a grateful heart lay it gently in the lap of the 
muses, that it may be wrought into imperishable history as an addi- 
tional evidence of his sincerity in life and his devotion to the grand 
principle of equal rights even in the embrace of death. He can 
never be repaid for the services he has rendered the Republic. No 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 79 

libation, adoration, or sacrifice can equal the beneficence and magni- 
tude of the services he has rendered his country and mankind. 

As for my race and me, his memory will ever be precious to us. 
We will embalm it among the choicest gems of our recollection. 

Yes; 

" Let laurels, drenched in pure Parnassian dews, 
Reward his memory, dear to every muse, 
Who, with a courage of unshaken root, 
In honor's field advancing his firm foot, 
Plants it upon the line that Justice draws, 
And will prevail or perish in her cause. 
'Tis to the virtues of such men man owes 
His portion in the good that Heaven bestows." 

Now, sir, my grateful task is done. This humble but heartfelt 
tribute I lay at the base of the broken column in token of him who 
was an eminent statesmen, renowned philanthropist, and devoted 
friend to the friendless. " May he rest in peace." 



Address of Mr, Pawes, of ^Massachusetts. 

Mr. Speaker : It is from no lack of eulogy or tribute already fitly 
spoken by stricken Massachusetts that I seek to be heard on this 
occasion. But, longer than any other of her Representatives here at 
the Capitol, it has been my good fortune to have been associated 
with Mr. Sumner in the public service and to stand by him as a 
colleague in the representation of that State. He had served a full 
term in the Senate when I entered this House more than seventeen 
years ago. I had met him here in his very first session, which was 
in fact the commencement of his public life; for that public life, when 
measured by the limitation of years, began and ended with his ser- 
vice as a Senator of the United States from Massachusetts. No 
man can justly estimate that great public career which has so sud- 
denly and sadly closed, who fails to comprehend the times which 



gave it birth and the events out of which its grand proportions have 
been rounded into matchless perfection and power. How much they 
developed him, and he them, belongs to the historian and biographer 
and not to the eulogist. 

The life and times of Charles Sumner will be a chapter in the 
world's history, standing out all alone and by itself. To the latest 
day that it will be read of men there will be found in it nothing ordi- 
nary, but, from its inception to its close, everything was cast in a 
mold which had no prototype, and on a scale by which nothing else 
has been measured. If we go back from the grand consummation 
to the beginning, there will be found the same extraordinary condi- 
tions which have attended every step of his great career upward and 
onward to its end. He had never held public office till he entered 
the Senate Chamber in December, 1851. Calhoun had died in the 
previous year, and both Clay and Webster in the year which fol- 
lowed. As Mr. Sumner entered the arena made illustrious by the 
great struggles of the giants of that day, and sought his own position 
in coming conflicts, Mr. Benton said to him : 

"You have come upon the stage too late, sir; all our great men 
have passed away. Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster 
are gone. Not only have the great men passed away, but the great 
issues too, raised from our form of government, and of deepest inter- 
est to its founders and their immediate descendants, have been settled 
also. The last of these was the National Bank, and that has been 
overthrown forever. Nothing is left you, sir, but puny sectional 
questions and petty strifes about slavery and fugitive-slave laws 
involving no national interests." 

How limited is human vision! The great men, and the then great 
issues with which they wrestled, filled, as they were receding from his 
view, the whole horizon of a~ statesman whose own participation in 
public affairs covered in that very forum the unparalleled period of 
thirty years. But as men sometimes build better than they know, 



so more often do they build in a way and tread a path they know 
not of. 

Calhoun, and Clay, and Webster, did, indeed, pass away. But 
the sun which seemed to set with them rose again, almost simulta- 
neously, with a new and a grander glory. And there was no night. 
Seward and Chase and Sumner stood up in the places made vacant 
by those mighty intellects. And issues more momentous and far- 
reaching than ever before confronted statesmanship sprung up under 
their very feet, and out of the ashes of struggles vainly supposed to 
have become extinct. 

The world's history furnishes no parallel to the pages which shall 
truthfully chronicle the character and consequences of the conflicts 
into which slavery and fugitive-slave laws hurled the nation almost 
from the hour of this lamentation over repose. And the young Sen- 
ator from Massachusetts had no occasion to wait for opportunity. He 
was summoned to the very front of the conflict, and, without hesita- 
tion or delay, took the position which conviction of duty as well as 
public exigency assigned him. If, therefore, it had been permitted to 
Mr. Sumner, standing at the goal and looking back along the years 
of his labor, with all that increased knowledge and wider experience, 
that wealth of philanthropy and expansion of heart which crowned 
his last days — had it then been permitted him to choose, could he 
have selected a moment more fit or crowded with grander opportu- 
nities for the enlistment of his vast and varied powers than the one 
which called him to his work? Hardly had he entered upon it be- 
fore he received upon his own person the concentrated malignity of 
that barbarous system of society with which he grappled, in blows 
the effects of which never left him, but which, failing to silence, con- 
secrated him to the sublime mission he so grandly filled. 

That work thus begun had many phases, and led him along many 
ways which sometimes, for the moment, seemed devious, and which 
ofttimes compelled him to invoke instrumentalities pronounced doubt- 



ADDRESS OF MR. DAWES ON THE 



ful by the bystander. But all the while it grew upon his hands — it 
broadened and it deepened — towering above and dwarfing all other 
work which fell to the lot of other statesmen. Grand in its very sim- 
plicity, sublime in its very comprehensiveness, it enlisted the noblest 
aspirations of the statesman and lifted his whole being into an atmos- 
phere and life and vigor all his own. 

Absolute human equality secured, assured, and invulnerable, 
was the work to which with a baptism of blood and suffering he con- 
secrated all his powers, all his life, and all his hopes. In that work 
he himself grew great. Around about it, as a center, all the attri- 
butes of his mind and elements of his character, called into active 
service and put to constant task, were developed, till like the one 
muscle of the blacksmith's right arm they attained a growth and 
strength unlike all others. 

He was an eloquent man. But through all his rhetoric gleamed 
the battle-ax, cleaving the chains of the slave and beating down the 
hoary head of caste. His orations were not set with diamonds nor 
decked with flowers, but they thundered along the unbending track 
of logic irresistible and crushing. They had one purpose, the con- 
summation of his life-work, and he in them marshaled the whole 
artillery of rhetoric and of speech for the assault. Learning he 
acquired as no other man in public life, but he devoted it all to this 
his one great struggle; and while he levied upon ancient lore and 
modern research alike for illustration, for argument, for admonition, 
and for encouragement, it was only as for so many recruits to the 
forces he commanded in a life-campaign against human bondage. 
Thus it is that his public addresses, with few exceptions, stand as 
monuments, both of his own power as an orator and of the trans- 
cendent work to which his whole life had been set apart. Yet on 
those rare occasions when he permitted himself as if in relaxation to 
indulge in current debate or in popular address, he has left ample 
evidence that his mind was richly endowed with all those rare gifts 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



§3 



of oratory which have in all times charmed, instructed, and swayed 
the popular mind. Some of these orations are masterly productions, 
of wide-spread fame. 

To speak of the work itself to which Mr. Sumner set apart his life, 
and for which he laid it down, would be to attempt not only the 
history of his country from his entrance into public life to the hour 
when his labors ceased, but also that of human rights and human 
equality the world over. This cannot be attempted here. Happily 
it is not needed to complete the duty of the hour. That work, once 
derided, denounced, scoffed at, and spit upon, has now conquered all 
opposition and to-day commands a support well nigh universal. 
There remains no forum in which its justice is debated, and no home 
or heart so lowly that its efficacy does not reach it. It was not per- 
mitted him to see the formal enactment of a civil-rights bill he had 
so long labored and waited for. But he knew that this key-stone of 
the grand arch was already fitted to its place. What he suffered, 
what he sacrificed, what he lifted and carried to the end of all things 
on earth to him, in the hope that his own work might be completed 
by his own hand, cannot now be put in words. 

I have said that Mr. Sumner was sometimes misunderstood. I 
speak not now of that common lot of public men which subjects 
them to the misrepresentations and denunciations of opponents often 
as indiscriminate as unjust. There is a more trying ordeal, when the 
vision of friends becomes dim, and familiar faces turn away for a time 
in doubt and distrust. Then the statesman who is faithful to his con- 
victions will wait patiently and silently in the path of duty till, the 
mist lifting and the light breaking in, the blinded see again the out- 
line of that pathway and hail anew his advancing footsteps. Thus 
recently his own beloved Commonwealth, proud and long-trusting as 
she is, yet for a moment losing her vision in a bewildering twilight, 
turned her face away from Mr. Sumner and his work. Not a word 
of complaint fell from his lips. Conscious of a lofty and noble aspi- 



&4 ADDRESS OF MR. POTTER ON THE 



ration, and with an unfaltering faith that time would bring him vin- 
dication, he waited patiently for the dawn of a brighter day and the 
opening of a clearer vision. They came at last, but only just in time 
to save her, in this her day of mourning, the added pang of unatoned 
injustice. 

I have no space to speak of those varied accomplishments, that 
wealth of knowledge, and that kindliness of heart which were the 
charm of his social life. But I desire to put on record my deep obli- 
gations for an unbroken friendship of seventeen years, begun in a 
common public service, and interrupted only by that great event 
which has alike crushed private friendships and social ties, and 
brought irreparable loss upon the public service, the country and 
mankind. 

Mr. Sumner reared his own monument and has left it complete. 
It will stand peerless through all the ages that free government and 
human equality shall exist on the earth. An enslaved race, lifted to 
freedom, to citizenship, and to equal rights, will crown it with the 
garlands of fresh effort and victorious struggle toward a completed 
manhood. The Commonwealth whose son he was, and whose com- 
mission he bore, will cherish tenderly his memory, and point proudly 
to the name which is at once history and inspiration. 



/DDRESS OF yVlR. JOTTER, OF JN[eW YORK. 

Mr. Speaker : But that I have been requested to do so, I should 
be unwilling to detain the House by adding any words of mine to 
the general expression of regret at the great national loss we all so 
deeply deplore. 

My acquaintance with Mr. Sumner, sir, only began during the 
Forty-first Congress. I was never intimate with him. But when I 



first met him he spoke to me of my father, whom he had known, with 
such warmth and feeling as always endeared him to me. I some- 
times had the pleasure of seeing him at my house, sometimes of visit- 
ing him at his. Those great powers and acquirements which made 
him so distinguished in public life, united with his large experience, 
ripe learning, and varied cultivation to make him charming in private 
life. To me he seemed never more so than in his own house, where 
he had collected about him so many souvenirs of travel and of taste, 
and was surrounded by so much that was best in literature and art 
and culture. His grand presence, his manners, always, so far as I 
observed, dignified but courteous, his recollections rich in knowledge 
of books, of men, and of events, his independence of thought and gifts 
of expression, all served to make me recall him as one of the most 
distinguished and impressive men it was ever my privilege to meet. 

Mr. Sumner began public life with strong convictions; convictions 
in which he was supported by the sympathy of his people and the 
action of his State. They were convictions that brought him into 
bitter and long-continued conflict with the leading men of the day— 
a conflict which ended only with the changes wrought by the late 
civil war, and the intensity of which may well have tended to limit 
the nature and range of his efforts and services. That throughout 
this conflict he bore himself earnestly, boldly, and efficiently, with an 
entire devotion to his convictions and an honorable disregard of per- 
sonal consequences, even those who differed from him admit; and 
that in the end he was not wanting, either in a large liberality or in a 
magnanimity alike generous and wise, all should gratefully remember. 

With Mr. Sumner's training and powers there were many walks of 
usefulness and success open to him ; but he preferred giving up the 
profession he had so well begun, to devote himself through life to the 
public service. After long years of arduous and important labor he 
died, leaving behind him but a slender estate, having received for all 
his services no other reward than the good he had achieved and the 



honor which attended it. Although he founded and built up a great 
and successful party, no man ever accused him of profiting by his 
pursuit of politics. His name was connected with no job, mixed 
with no share in doubtful profits, stained by no scandal. Called 
away suddenly in all the fullness of his powers, so that the very day 
before his death he seemed to me as grand, as useful, and as genial 
as ever, he left public life as he entered it, with clean hands and un- 
sullied name. 

Such service is always patriotic and useful. But as the country in- 
creases, and its numbers and interests become greater and more con- 
flicting, the need for men of intelligence and culture willing to give 
their attention to public affairs without personal profit increases also. 
In a small and sparse community government is easy; but when 
numbers grow great and men crowd upon each other, so that each 
must surrender to others some portion of his natural rights, the diffi- 
culties of government begin. With our increasing wealth and grow- 
ing population and crowded cities and varied industries, our need of 
men willing and able to permanently devote themselves, without 
hope of gain, to the duties of government, becomes yearly more and 
more pressing. 

All of that this distinguished man did. With a fidelity worthy of 
every praise, with a diligence not exceeded by any man in pubfic life, 
for more than twenty years he gave up his great powers and learn- 
ing and acquirements to the public service with a purity, a zeal, and 
an ability which, however men may differ as to the soundness or 
breadth of his views, entitle him to the honor and the praise of all, 
whatever their political faith, who respect patriotic and distinguished 
service. For, Mr. Speaker, in a nation so vast as this men must 
needs differ, and differ widely, in respect of government; and the citi- 
zen who gives to the nation his best service, according to the light 
that he has, does all that is permitted to him, and deserves, indeed, 
well of his country. 



Mr. Sumner's share in public life was during a time of conflict 
and revolution, followed happily by peace and almost general mate- 
rial prosperity; but followed, too, by circumstances which call now, 
as much, perhaps, as ever, for large and statesmanlike qualities, for 
careful consideration of the true principles of government and of 
those changes in our system which the altered political and physical 
condition of the country have made necessary. That great Com- 
monwealth which so honored him, and which he so long and so 
faithfully represented, will, indeed, be fortunate if she shall find other 
sons ready to worthily bear up the torch this great Senator held so 
long aloft to light the way for the national progress, and which at 
the last he let fall only with his life. 



Address of Mr. Kelley, of Pennsylvania. 

Mr. Speaker: When, on the 4th of July, 1861, I first took the 
oath of office as a member of Congress, my then venerable colleague, 
the late Thaddeus Stevens, was the acknowledged leader of the 
House. He had been a life-long foe to slavery ; and such was his 
hostility to the spirit of caste, that he was unwilling that his pro- 
test against it should terminate with his life, and by provisions in his 
will directed that his body should be interred in an obscure cemetery 
in the suburbs of the city he had so long represented, and that his 
resting-place should be marked by a simple stone bearing these char- 
acteristic words : 

" I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural 
preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited by charter 
rules as to race, 1 have chosen it that I might be enabled to illustrate 
in my death the principles which I have advocated throughout a long 
life — equality of man before his Creator." 

Owen Lovejoy, whose moral heroism had long commanded my 



admiration, was the member of the House for whose name I listened 
with most interest when the roll was called, that I might see the 
person of him who had with such burning eloquence defied the slave- 
power in this House and elsewhere. John P. Hale and Charles 
Sumner were then in the Senate, from which William H. Seward and 
Salmon P. Chase had recently withdrawn— the former to enter upon 
the duties of the office of Secretary of State, and the latter upon those 
of Secretary of the Treasury. None of them are now among the liv- 
ing ; each, having closed the work appointed to him, has gone to his 
reward. Great and good as these men were, they were not faultless. 
He who had been would not have been a man. But the world is 
better for the life of each of them. Their labors and example im- 
proved our moral and political atmosphere, and though they have 
been withdrawn from our presence, their influence is scarcely less 
potent now than it was when they responded to the call of President 
Lincoln, and in their respective spheres devoted themselves to the 
maintenance of the Army and Navy that were to suppress the rebel- 
lion and invest with all the rights pertaining to American citizenship 
the lowliest slave in the land. 

Mr. Sumner was the last survivor of this illustrious group. He 
hoped for the early passage of a bill the provisions of which should 
enable all men to maintain and enforce their civil rights as the com- 
pletion of their joint life-work. Had he lived to see such a bill 
enrolled among our statutes he might well have expressed the com- 
pleteness of his gratification in the often-quoted exclamation of 

Simeon of old. 

How conspicuous a part Mr. Sumner took in the legislation of 
Congress during his long senatorial career others have told. It was 
such as had been permitted to few men, and yet I have often thought 
that he would have more largely affected the sentiment and conscience 
of the country had he never been involved in the active and exhaust- 
ing duties of the Senate. It has seemed to me that he was too much 



devoted to letters and too intensely wedded to abstract sentiment to 
be either an influential statesman or a successful politician ; that he 
was too cosmopolitan in his statesmanship to influence current 
policies, and too little of a politician to be a successful statesman. 
The readiness with which he accepted broad and generous proposi- 
tions, which in terms promised beneficent results, led him to disre- 
gard the influence of details which in the complicated web and woof 
of human life often thwart the application of general laws ; and I 
have never doubted that the prevalence of his theories of trade and 
finance — free-trade and the limitation of the medium of exchange to 
a volume of paper-money so restricted that it might ever be inter- 
changeable with gold — would, while paralyzing the energy of the 
North, have reduced the plantation hands of the South to a degra- 
dation in freedom from which the interests of their owners had pro- 
tected them in slavery. They are the policies which have been 
applied by England to British India, and which, by destroying its 
ancient and diversified industries, have from time to time depopu- 
lated its most fertile districts by famine and the diseases consequent 
upon long-continued hunger. As a teacher — through the press, the 
foium, and the rostrum — Mr. Sumner's illustrations of great prin- 
ciples would have been free from the suspicion of partisanship and he 
unembarrassed by the personal strife which is inseparable from a 
parliamentary career. 

Permit me in support of this suggestion to refer to but two of his 
early addresses, each of which produced controlling and life-long 
impressions on my mind. 

It is now nearly thirty years since I read an occasional address by 
Mr. Sumner, which had been delivered on the 4th of July, 1845, 
before the municipal authorities of the city of Boston. His subject 
was " The true grandeur of nations," and I think it is not saying too 
much to express the belief that the power and amplitude of illus- 
tration with which he treated the subject did much to prepare the 



9° 



ADDRESS OF MR. KELLEY ON THE 



people of Great Britain and the United States for the settlement by 
arbitration rather than by trial of battle of the difficulties that grew 
out of our late civil war. The discussion of his theme was purely 
abstract ; it was free from party bias or personal allusion, and well 
calculated to captivate the mind of every generous youth into whose 
hands it might come. 

The other instance to which I refer occurred but a few years 
later, when Mr. Sumner appeared before the supreme court of 
Massachusetts, December 4, 1849, as counsel for Sarah C. Roberts, 
a colored child but five years old, who by her next friend had sued 
the city of Boston for damages on account of a refusal to receive her 
into one of the public schools. The question as stated by him was, 
" Can any discrimination on account of color or race be made under 
the constitution and laws of Massachusetts among the children enti- 
tled to the benefit of our public schools?" In opening his argument 
he said to the court: 

" This little child asks at your hands her personal rights. So doing, 
she calls upon you to decide a question which concerns the personal 
rights of other colored children; which concerns the fundamental 
principles of human rights; which concerns the Christian character 
of this community. Such parties, and such interests, so grand and 
varied, may justly challenge your most earnest attention." 

Close as was the legal argument and ample as were the authorities 
cited, the speech was read most widely by the unprofessional public, 
and the freedom from caste which characterizes the schools of the 
young States' of the Northwest may be largely ascribed to the influ- 
ence of this argument presented to a bench of judges in Massachu- 
setts. Let me bring it anew to the attention of the public by making 
a brief citation or two, which may be read with profit in the practical 
discussions of our day : 

"As the State receives strength from the unity and solidarity of its 
citizens without distinction of class, so the school receives new strength 



from the unity and solidarity of all classes beneath its roof. In this 
way the poor, the humble, and the neglected share not only the com- 
panionship of their more favored brethren, but enjoy also the protec- 
tion of their presence, in drawing toward the school a more watchful 
superintendence. A degraded or neglected class, if left to themselves, 
will become more degraded or neglected. To him that hath shall be 
given; and the world, true to these words, turns from the poor and 
outcast to the rich and fortunate. It is the aim of our system of 
public schools, by the blending of all classes, to draw upon the whole 
school the attention which is too apt to be given only to the favored 
few, and thus secure the poor their portion of the fruitful sunshine. But 
the colored children placed apart by themselves are deprived of this 
blessing. 

"May it please your honors, such are some of the things which it 
has occurred to me to say in this important cause. I have occupied 
much of your time, but I have not yet exhausted the topics. Still, 
which way soever we turn, we are brought back to one single propo- 
sition, the equality of men before the law. This stands as the mighty 
guardian of the rights of the colored children in this case. It is the 
constant, ever-present, tutelary genius of this Commonwealth, frown- 
ing upon every privilege of birth, upon every distinction of race, 
upon every institution of caste. You cannot slight it or avoid it. 
You cannot restrain it. It remains that you should welcome it. Do 
this, and your words will be a 'charter and freehold of rejoicing' to 
a race which has earned by much suffering a title to much regard. 
Your judgment will become a sacred landmark, not in jurisprudence 
only, but in the history of freedom, giving precious encouragement to 
all the weary and heavy-laden wayfarers in this great cause. Massa- 
chusetts will then through you have a fresh title to regard, and be 
once more, as in times past, an example to the whole land." 

But, Mr. Speaker, grand and inspiring as were the utterances of Mr. 
Sumner, he has left to the youth of our country a heritage more 
precious even than they in the story of his daily walk in life, the 
excellence of his habits, his untiring industry, his love of art, poetry, 
sentiment, and in the noble aims for which he lived. 



92 ADDRESS OF MR. NESMITH ON THE 



Address of JAr. J^esmith, of Pregon. 

Mr. Speaker : To the tributes inspired by personal and political 
friendship which are paid to the memory of the illustrious dead, per- 
mit me to add a word expressive of my respect for and appreciation 
of the man. 

Possibly the little I have to say will be entitled to the more con- 
sideration from the fact that whatever I may speak in praise comes 
from an opponent who for six years served with Charles Sumner 
in the other end of the Capitol without having entertained a political 
sentiment in common with that great man. I can say that through 
all this opposition he commanded my respect, and in some instances 
my admiration. I recognized in him an embodiment of New Eng- 
land's high sense of duty. He always appeared to me a pure, single- 
hearted, earnest man. While lacking the enthusiasm that comes of 
generous impulse, the intense earnestness of his nature produced a 
quality so like it that the substitute was often accepted. 

What was fanaticism in others appeared from his cultivated, high 
position as patriotism, and, although a refined John Brown, he threw 
about his efforts such a charm of learning, such graces of rhetoric, 
that it seems a wrong to class him with the coarse fanatic who 
molded into bullets the feelings and words the orator uttered in the 
Senate. 

John Brown was Charles Sumner reduced to practical action, 
and both represented the rock-ribbed and iron bound land where duty 
takes the place of impulse. 

I am unacquainted with the early history of Charles Sumner, 
beyond the outline of his public career, estimating him as I did from 
a stand-point that made me almost impartial. I have always been 
impressed with the belief that much of his marked advocacy of equal 
rights grew out of his personal experience. Dr. Johnson tells us that 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



93 



" in a majority of instances cruelty is but another name for igno- 
rance." A man therefore to appreciate oppression, as Charles 
Sumner seemed to do, must have felt keenly the wrongs of oppres- 
sion. We know that upon his first appearance in public life he took 
up the cry of the oppressed that found words in his last utterances. 
We know that this was brought home to him in the saddest and most 
painful manner during his career in the Senate before the war, and I 
am of the opinion that it was his experience long before he entered 
public life. We all know that there is no part of the globe where 
caste has a more iron rule than in New England, and I can well im- 
agine the early struggles of a sensitive and cultivated mind against 
its despotism. 

He had a quality for which the world never gave him credit, and 
that was high courage. He fought bravely the social tyranny he 
suffered from in his own land, and he fought with still higher cour- 
age what to him was the cruelist despotism known to humanity, and 
as he fought his earnestness grew more intense. It was not that he 
felt for the down-trodden negro whose cause he advocated, but that 
his manhood resented the cruel injustice of a dominant class. 

And here, sir, I wish to call attention to that quality in Senator 
Sumner that is in him so little understood or appreciated. He came 
to the Senate of the United States the avowed advocate of the slave, 
and the uncompromising, bitter opponent of the master. Entirely 
alone, backed up by no great party, unaided by a solitary voice of 
friendship, he bearded the lion in his den. At that time, sir, it was 
not considered even respectable to be such an advocate, and the 
man who voluntarily thrust himself into such a position made the 
tender of open hostility to nearly all the rest of his countrymen, 
while he carried his own life in his hand. You may call this the 
foolhardiness born of fanaticism, but I recognize in it an example of 
moral and physical courage combined such as the world has rarely 
witnessed. 



94 



ADDRESS OF MR. NESMITH ON THE 



Physical courage is an inherent quality in the most of our race, 
and there are but few men who would not prefer to mount the deadly 
breach or march to the cannon's mouth rather than suffer the re- 
proaches, the contempt, the obloquy, and the scorn of their country- 
men. Charles Sumner led the forlorn hope in practically facing 
all these dangers combined. 

We must all remember who have read, and certainly no one can 
forget who witnessed the scene, the chivalrous effort that led to an 
assault upon him in his seat in the Senate Chamber. A gentleman, 
belonging to the democratic party, who happened to be upon the 
floor of the Senate at the time, tells me that it was almost melodra- 
matic in its effect. In that great historic hall of eloquence, the old 
Senate Chamber, there were present the assembled legislative wis- 
dom of the nation, and while all appeared calm and peaceful, under- 
lying this smooth and placid exterior was that deadly animosity 
which a few years later culminated in the most sanguinary civil war 
that a nation ever experienced. 

When Charles Sumner addressed the President, he must have 
felt all that the scowling eyes and sneering lips conveyed to him. If 
he looked around for sympathy or support, it was to find a few cow- 
ering friends utterly appalled at his audacity; and yet he was as 
cool, self-possessed, and brave as if he had at his back an army of 
supporters. His audacity, manly person, youthful appearance, and 
courage won for him sympathy akin to admiration from his enemies, 
shown in the profound attention they gave to his bitter utterances 
and stinging invective. Those who witnessed the scene, or have 
read of it, remember the storm of wrath and indignation that was 
poured out upon the head of the young Senator, and we know how 
he arose again and again with undaunted courage to repel the 

attack. 

And subsequently to this scene, so feebly described, another mani- 
festation of this sublime quality of high physical courage was exhib- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 95 

ited when he was subjected to the most severe and excruciating 
surgical tortures, and bore them with the uncomplaining fortitude 
and stoical indifference of the North American savage. 

Let us, then, Mr. Speaker, give him our admiration for the high 
qualities of which in public estimation he has been so long deprived. 
Learned, eloquent, pure, and earnest, he had not, in my estima- 
tion, any claims to statesmanship. This is shown by the fact that he 
closed his public career at the very moment he secured a triumph of 
his own all-engrossing idea some ten years since. The fanatical 
reformer is seldom a builder ; the image-breaker cannot replace the 
image he destroys. Of all that little band who from the first led the 
forlorn hope which ultimately effected the organization of a great 
political party, not one was found capable of guiding or controlling 
it. They turned their command over to more practical minds than 
Charles Sumner's — to men so eminently practical, that they not 
only rebuilt for others, but remarkably well for themselves. It is 
curious, sir, to look about me and see men now in command of that 
party that Charles Sumner created, who while he was in the 
minority denounced him as a fanatic, an abolitionist, an enemy of 
good order, of his country, and of mankind, but who now exceed 
his utterances in their screams for refused rights. Their conversion 
was probably his most marvelous achievement. 

But, sir, had he possessed the statesman's creative power, he was 
too pure a man for the politics of our day and generation. In his 
high position it was not possible for him to be the paid advocate; it 
was not possible for him to be the associate of men who, while wav- 
ing the banner of freedom with one hand, stole from the public 
Treasury with the other. Why, sir, he was so pure and single- 
hearted that he could not even understand such characters. 

Differing as I honestly and heartily did with Mr. Somner upon 
the great issues out of which his fame grew, I feel it incumbent upon 
myself to say that, while my own opinions upon those questions 



remain at variance with his, I concede to him an honesty of purpose 
in urging his peculiar theories with a pertinacity unparalleled in our 
political history. Defeat strongly inspired him with renewed energy; 
and when the popular vote of the nation, as it did at times, con- 
demned him and his cause, he, phcenix-like, arose from the ashes of 
defeat to advocate with fresh ardor and invigorated courage the 
" equality of the races before the /a7i>." 

His courage was of a higher order than that inspired by mere 
brute force. He adhered to his theories through contumely, adver- 
sity, and disgrace; and when the results of his labors, his sufferings, 
and his courage elevated those who had defamed and despitefully 
used him from obscurity to power, he bore their renewed reproaches 
with but slight retaliation or complaint. 

In my humble estimation Mr. Sumner never appeared to greater 
advantage than when he magnanimously proposed in the Senate that 
the achievements of our gallant troops in an intestine war should be 
obliterated from their flags. An envious and malignant man would 
have desired to see our southern brethren humiliated by the embla- 
zonment of their disasters upon that proud banner which we all as 
American citizens desire to hail as the emblem of a great and united 
nationality. 

The evil passions growing out of the war had become so furious 
and unreasoning as to cause his own State to condemn his generous 
impulses upon that subject; but I thank God that his last moments 
on earth were cheered with the rescinding resolutions of the repre- 
sentatives of a people, themselves the descendants of rebels, who felt, 
upon sober second thought, what was due to a people who had gal- 
lantly risked their lives in their adherence to what they conceived to 
be the principle that " all just government is derived from the consent 
of the governed." His familiarity with English history had demon- 
strated to him the folly of perpetuating hatreds and sanguinary rem- 
iniscences in a people who, in the nature of things, should be homo- 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



97 



geneous. In the latter part of his life he gave evidence of his 
abhorrence of white political slavery no less than that which per- 
tained to the African. 

Mr. Speaker, inexorable death has claimed Charles Sumner as 
his own, and the grave has closed over his mortal remains. We 
shall never in our generation look upon his like again, simply because 
there are no surroundings to develop such a character. The freedom 
of the African is assured, and it now remains the highest duty of the 
statesman to assure the freedom of the citizen. 

"Peace hath her victories no less renowned than Avar;" and the 
man who by persistent direction of peaceful agencies converts a na- 
tion of politicians to his views is as much entitled to the triumphal 
arch as is the mere soldier who, by the unreasoning power of brute 
force, completes a victory with the sword and points to the hecatomb 
of the slain as his passport to power. The saddest thing about 
Charles Sumner's life, to me, is that he survived himself — that he 
lived to see other men occupying the proud positions and wielding 
the power he had created, with no higher motive prompting them 
than the self-aggrandizement to be found in wealth. 

I have only hinted at .his faults, few as they were. I have no 
heart to dwell upon his failings. He had the egotism of genius and 
the impatience of fanatical conviction. He may be said to have 
lived alone, never knowing pleasant companionship, and meeting the 
world only to be flattered and admired or to be fought. His, how- 
ever, were faults we can readily forget, and failings we are willing to 
forgive. 

He is gone from among us. His chair in the Senate, to which all 
eyes were turned when any great question agitated that grave body, 
will never be filled by a public servant more pure in his motives, more 
elevated and courageous in his action, or truer to his convictions. 
Let us keep his virtues in remembrance. May his monument be 
of spotless marble, for it cannot be purer or whiter than his life. 



98 ADDRESS OF MR. G. F. HOAR ON THE 



jAiDDRESS OF yVlR. p. f. JioAR, OF ^MASSACHUSETTS. 

Mr. Speaker : I should prefer to leave this theme to those of my 
colleagues who have been longer and more conspicuous in the public 
service. But the community which I represent was bound to our 
great Senator by a tie closer, I think, than that of any other. In the 
city of Worcester he first publicly devoted himself to the great cause 
to which his life was consecrated. From that day to his death, for 
more than twenty-five years, through his eventful career, through all 
the obloquy and strife and hatred which it was his lot to encounter, 
that people have loved and honored him, scarcely ever divided from 
him in judgment, never in principle, never in affection; and it seems 
to me fitting that in this season of funeral sorrow and of funeral tri- 
umph its voice should not be silent. 

Charles Sumner's public life was spent in one place — the Senate 
Chamber, and was devoted to one cause — the equality of all men 
before the law. For that arena and that ' great argument his first 
forty years .must be considered only as preparation. He came to 
manhood, leaving Harvard with the best training his native State 
had to bestow. He was a model of manly beauty and of manly 
stiength, attracting the eye in every assembly, capable of great ath- 
letic feats, and able to sustain the most severe and continuous study. 
To the best American training he added what foreign travel could 
give. He mastered the principal modern languages, and formed 
intimacies with the distinguished men of Europe, especially with those 
of his own profession. He became a learned lawyer, editing the 
twenty volumes of Vesey, jr., himself reporting the decisions of his 
friend Judge Story, and contributing many original essays to the 
American Jurist. His -great native powers of oratory, the indispen- 
sable instruments of his future service, he trained and manifested by 
numerous public addresses, in which, thus early, he unfolded the 



principles and opinions from which he never swerved. The full 
vigor of his intellect he retained till his death. But that magnetic 
eloquence which inspired and captivated large masses of men as he 
molded the lessons of history, the ornaments of literature, the com- 
mandments of law, human and divine, into his burning and impas- 
sioned plea for the slave, belonged only to his youth. He never 
fully regained it after the assault upon him in the Senate Chamber. 
His vast learning and retentive memory were a marvel. I remember 
in my boyhood hearing an eminent scholar style him the encyclopae- 
dia of Boston. 

He was familiar with all heroic literature. His style, without 
much variety, reminded you of some of the statelier passages of 
Burke, whom in person he resembled, resembling also in its affluence 
of citation that "field of the cloth of gold," the prose of John 
Milton. 

Old men who had trod the highest paths of fame recognized the 

promise of the youth and sought his companionship. Probably no 

young man in America ever counted such a host of illustrious friends. 

Among them were Kent, the greatest modern writer on jurisprudence, 

(unless we join Kent himself in preferring Story,) and De Tocqueville, 

that wisest of Frenchmen, who has understood the institutions of 

America better than any man since the men who builded them, and 

' from whom Sumner received that maxim in which he delighted: " Life 

is neither a pain nor a pleasure, but a serious business, which it is our 

duty to carry through and to terminate with honor." Among them 

were some still alive, famous in poetry, in letters, and in science, whose 

unfailing affection cheered the darkest hours of his life. Among them 

were four— John Pickering, the illustrious scholar, whom Sumner 

called the leader in the revival of learning in America, comparing 

him to Erasmus— Washington Allston, Story, and Channing— whom 

he commemorated in that wonderful oration of eulogy, in which, 

taking them as representatives and examples, he set forth the four 



ADDRESS OF MR. G. F. HOAR ON THE 



ideals which he kept ever before his own gaze — knowledge, justice, 
beauty, love. 

Such was Charles Sumner when he was called to choose his side 
in the great battle of which our nation was to be the scene. Never 
did hero, martyr, or saint choose more bravely or worthily. The 
party to which he had belonged, dominant for a generation in Mas- 
sachusetts, was just wresting the national authority from the grasp of 
its ancient rival. The victory of either was the victory of slavery. 
Turning his back on the victors, he chose the conquered cause. Fond 
of power, fitted for its exercise, he chose the side of weakness. Sur- 
rounded by wealth, he chose the cause of the poor. Rich in friends, 
he became the defender of the friendless. Favorite of that cultivated 
society, his great heart went out in sympathy for the ignorant and 
degraded slave. He joined himself to a small political association, 
not strong enough to carry three districts in the country, who made 
opposition to slavery the cardinal doctrine of their creed. 

The indignation of Massachusetts at the passage of the compro- 
mise measures of 1850, especially the fugitive-slave bill, for which the 
whig administration of Millard Fillmore was responsible, enabled the 
free-soil party, combining with the democratic minority, to elect Mr. 
Sumner to the Senate, where he took his seat in 185 1. From that 
time forth he was the undoubted leader of the political opposition to. 
slavery. His speeches stirred the public heart and conscience to their 
depths, and were the arsenal from which the most effective arguments 
were drawn. 

The sure instinct of slavery did not err when it recognized him as 
its implacable foe. At last a man had come to the Senate to whom 
the ideal higher law was real; on whom threats and blandishments 
alike were lost; who would not buy popularity or office; who would 
not buy success for his party, or even safety and prosperity for his 
country, by injustice. There was no mistake about him. The min- 
ions of tyranny sought eagerly for his destruction, thinking that with 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



him the new-born movement for freedom would perish. But, fools 
and blind, they saw not that the eternal forces were behind him. 
They thought if they could but silence that bugle-note, the music of 
liberty would die out over the land. They thought if they could but 
strike down that sentinel on the ramparts, the awakening nation would 
turn itself again to its long sleep. They thought if they could but 
stifle the clarion voice of the herald of the day, the morning itself 
would not dawn. 

The secret of Charles Sumner's power lay in two qualities which 
he impressed on this people in larger measure than any other man of 
his time— his conscientiousness and his faith. Others, a good many, 
equaled him in eloquence; others, a few, equaled him in scholarship. 
But he alone was the interpreter of the conscience of this people. 
To every proposition he applied the inexorable test— is it right? Is 
it absolutely just? Unless his puritanic sense of rectitude was satis- 
fied he would not yield. No argument of political expediency, no 
whisper of administrative caution, no deference to associates, no 
regard for venerated authorities, no consideration of fitness of occa- 
sion, no fear for himself, would induce him to abate one jot of his 
indignant denunciation. With this trait he could not be other than 
the life-long foe of slavery. 

There was no optimism in his nature. He never turned his gaze 
away from evil, or looked on it but to hate it and to strike it. But in the 
darkest days of war, or those darker days worse than war, when slavery 
ruled, he never lost his sublime faith in the triumph of justice, truth, 
equality, wrought out in the Republic by the power of a free people. 
This secret of his power and the rule of his public life will be found 
in two of his own sentences, one almost the opening sentence in his 
first great public discourse, the other which I heard him utter toward 
the close of life in a debate on the civil-rights bill, that great and 
crowning measure of justice, in care for which he forgot himself m 
the very hour of death. "Never aim at aught which is not right, 



J 



102 ADDRESS OF MR. G. F. HOAR ON THE 

persuaded that without this every possession will become an evil and 
a shame." "Trust the Republic, and the ideas which are its strength 
and safety." 

No eulogy of Charles Sumner will be complete which leaves out 
his faults. When common men die we may invoke the adage, "JVil 
de mortuis nisi bonutn" or utter that sadder cry of human frailty, 
" yam pane sepulto." But of this man we can say the whole truth. 
Two grave defects marred the symmetry of his moral and intellectual 
nature. The first was a certain want of proportion or perspective in 
his mental vision, which made him exaggerate the evil or good quali- 
ties of men whom he had occasion to blame or praise, or the import- 
ance of measures with which he was concerned. In saying this we 
should not forget how often time has brought round the popular 
judgment to his own. 

The other was a graver fault. In him the egotism often fostered 
by a long senatorial career seems to have been natural. He pos- 
sessed an inordinate confidence in his own judgments. He was in- 
tolerant of difference or of opposition. It was hard for men his 
equals in station, themselves accustomed to respect, conscious of 
equal desire for the general welfare, to submit to his impatient and 
imperious criticism. What he saw he seemed to himself to see with 
absolute clearness and certainty. He could not understand the state 
of mind of a man who did not see it as he did. But this, his greatest 
fault, was a protection to him in the warfare in which he was engaged. 
Imagine Mr. Sumner in Washington from 1851 to 1857, almost 
alone, an object of general hatred, receiving by nearly every mail 
threats of violence and assassination, possessed with a modest distrust 
of his own convictions, and exhibiting an amiable deference to the 
opinions of other people ! Nothing but the absolute certainty of his 
confidence in his cause and in himself could have sustained him in 
those years of obloquy and peril. 

I have spoken of his injustice to his associates and his intolerance 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



!°3 



of opposition. But the harshness and bitterness with which for the 
time being he spoke of men who opposed the measures he had at 
heart-, he never felt toward mere personal antagonists. I may sur- 
prise some persons who have not carefully studied Mr. Sumner, but 
I am sure of the assent of those who knew him best, when I declare 
that he was as free as any man I ever knew from personal hatreds, 
and that his lofty and generous nature was absolutely incapable of 
revenge. Let the man whom he considered to have most wronged 
him, or to have most wronged the Republic, but unite with him 
heartily in any cause which was dear to him, and the bitterest es- 
trangements were forgotten. 

Who shall say that he thought more highly of himself than he de- 
served; that he demanded for himself or his opinion greater consid- 
eration than would now be accorded to them by the judgment of 
mankind ? In the words of that fine sentence of the Ethica of Aris- 
totle, applied by the English historian to the younger Pitt, "He 
thought himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy." 

There was at least nothing petty or mean in these traits. They 

were the foibles of a lofty and noble nature. 

" To his own self not always just, 

Bound in the bonds which all men share; 
Confess the failings as we must, 
The lion's mark is always there." 

At any rate there he was to be seen and known of all men. There 
was no secrecy in his nature. He was the soul of truth. His public 
and his private life corresponded. Of one thing those who love him 
are secure. History will lay bare no secret which will tarnish the 
whiteness of his fame. His correspondence, his conversation, the 
secrets of his chamber, may be made known to mankind. No in- 
trigue, no dissimulation, no artifice, no selfish ambition, no impure 

thought or act shall be found. 

" Whatever record leap to light, 
He never shall be shamed." 



104 ADDRESS OF MR. G. F. HOAR ON THE 



He was hearty and generous in his friendships. No man took 
greater delight in other men's services to freedom or rewarded them 
with a more precious and bountiful commendation. To receive his 
praise for any service to human liberty was like being knighted by 
Cceur de Lion or Henry V on the field of battle. 

He said lately that the happiest period of his life was when he was 
a student at law. The time of the close of the war must have been 
equally so. He had seen the great desire of his life fulfilled. The 
eyes which had ached with sorrow and with toil had gazed upon the 
glory and the beauty of the harvest. The martyr of free speech, the 
solitary and despised champion of liberty, had lived to be the honored 
leader of the Senate. The friendship and confidence of Lincoln, who 
knew and loved the noble nature of the man; the gratitude of the 
American people, the recollection of great tasks successfully achieved, 
the affection of hosts of friends, the expectation of new and most con- 
genial employments in the country's service, the enjoyments of litera- 
ture, the resources of art — everything that could adorn, everything 
that could delight the remainder of a life scarce past its vigorous 
prime, seemed to be his. 

But fate ordered it otherwise. The voice of duty, obeyed at prime, 
called him to new sacrifices and new strifes until the end. 

The last morning on which he came to the Senate Chamber, to the 
inquiry of a friend who met him, he answered: "I am tired, tired." 
As I heard of it just afterward, I thought of a sentence in that mag- 
nificent opening passage of his first great discourse, in which he seems 
to dedicate himself to the service of the Republic: "We must not fold 
our hands in slumber, nor abide content with the past. To each gen- 
eration is committed its peculiar task; nor does the heart which re- 
sponds to the call of duty find rest except in the grave." Ah, heart, 
so dauntless and so tender, well hast thou kept that early vow! Ever 
responding to the call of duty, from the day when Massachusetts 
gave thee to thy country in the fullness of thy youthful promise, till 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 105 



that saddest moment when we saw thee borne cold in death from the 
portals of the Capitol, thou hast known no rest. At last thy country 
gives thee back to thy native Commonwealth, to sleep in her holy 
pilgrim soil with the kindred dust of the sons, many and brave, who 
have well obeyed the lesson she taught them in their youth— with 
Samuel Adams, and Otis, and the elder and the younger Quincy, 
and John Adams and his illustrious son. Like them, he learned at 
her knees the lessons of liberty. Like them, he encountered hatred 
and strife and peril. Like them, he lived to see the seed he had 
sown bearing its abundant harvest, and, like theirs, his grateful coun- 
try shall preserve his fame. 

" For the memorial of virtue is immortal, because it is known with 
God and with men. When it is present, men take example at it, and 
when it is gone they desire it ; it weareth a crown and triumpheth 
forever, having gotten the victory, striving for undefiled rewards." 



^DDRESS OF y\5.R. pONGKR, OF yVllCHIGAN. 

Mr. Speaker : The true analysis of human character requires pro- 
found knowledge, extensive research, and the most critical judgment 
of any subject that commands the attention of the human mind. 

Great names on the pages of history shine ever with their own 
unborrowed light. Eulogy cannot add to their glory, detraction can- 
not dim their luster. 

The ostracism of one generation may be supplemented by adora- 
tion of another. The scorn and derision of one age may merge in 
devotion and reverence in those that follow, and the very implements 
of disgraceful torture may become sacred symbols of devout faith to 
myriad followers. Yet. all this while the true character of the indi- 
vidual had remained unchanged ; his life in all its relations to the 
world in which he moved had been rounded, perfected, finished; and 



Io6 ADDRESS OF MR. CONGER ON THE 



it held its place in the grand living panorama of the world's progres- 
sion, unaltered and unalterable. 

Seldom, if ever, can the then present age be so free from the errors 
of prejudice or partiality as to warrant confidence in the accuracy of 
its judgments or the correctness of its conclusions. If such sugges- 
tions are forcible regarding the great names of history whose achieve- 
ments were illustrated by mere physical endurance or personal daring, 
with what modesty should we venture to delineate the character and 
motives of that illustrious citizen who in one and the same age, the 
same generation, and among the same people, has been the object of 
unlimited hate, of boundless veneration ! 

Charles Sumner, in the fullness and perfectness of his character, 
would have been impossible in any other age, among any other 
people, in any other phase of human civilization. He was cast in the 
mold of these times, imbued with the spirit of this age, but enriched 
with the learning of the world; of great moral courage, command- 
ing presence, intense individuality, his personality and self-estimation 
almost offensive, his tenacity of will bordering upon obstinacy, influ- 
enced little by the tender emotions of human nature, but a devout 
worshiper of abstract truth and right, and a fearless champion in 
their defense whenever and wherever occasion arose. 

For the marvelous changes in our civilization to which he was to 
contribute his very faults were necessities, his very failings were in- 
dispensable, his pride and egotism and self-assurance were funda- 
mental elements of his success. 

His lack of personal sympathy and emotional affection left room 
and place for all humanity. 

For him, insult and injury sanctified the cause which he defended ; 
opprobium and scorn hallowed the theories which he had espoused, 
and had imbued with his own intense personality. Common truths 
were enlarged to immortal grandeur in his vision, when adorned with 
the gems of his eloquence and surrounded with the halo of his learning. 



A servile and degraded race were to him kings and priests, so soon 
as he became the champion of their rights and had thrown over them 
the banner of his protection. His own pathway was illuminated by 
the light of his intense individuality, and all who traveled with him 
along that royal road were clothed in purple, and all who went by 
other ways were groping in darkness. 

Governments and people, working out the problem of their growth 
otherwise than by his elaborated plan, were rushing madly to ruin. 
Constitutions and laws lacking the absolute assertion of the grand 
truths of humanity were in his eyes a delusion and a snare. 

To him the absolute equality of all human beings on the plane of 
civil and political rights left no place for partiality; no room for 
prejudice. 

The vast world was to become the abode of enfranchised millions. 
The revelations from Heaven and the arcana of nature alike shad- 
owed -forth the universal disenthrallment of humanity, and he gloried 
in the belief that he was the recognized apostle of liberty. All things 
conspired to strengthen such a conviction— the admiration of friends, 
the persecution of enemies, the stern devotion of the puritan, the 
intense hatred of the chivalry, the boundless confidence of the op- 
pressed, and the scorn of the dominant race. 

Even his personal peculiarities strengthened this belief. His com- 
manding presence, the grand intonations of his far-sounding voice, 
the triumphant utterance of his splendid sentences, the almost bar- 
baric display of literary wealth gleaned from all languages and 
gathered from all lands, the triumphal progress of his high-sounding 
oratory, the imperial consciousness of his right to the throne, and 
even the jealousy that would brook no rival near that throne, all 
around him and all within conspired to assure him that he was 
appointed and anointed the grand high priest of the changing 
civilization and renovated institutions of this marvelous era of 
American history. 



108 ADDRESS OF MR. CONGER ON THE 

True to that conviction, to the fixed belief in his calling and destiny, 
he lived and labored and died. 

Whatever his faults, whatever his failings, he never faltered, he 
never wavered. In small things and in great, every occasion found 
him ready, and every opportunity was a renewal of his devotion. 

Mr. Speaker, nearly twenty years have passed since I first met Mr. 
Sumner. He had been sojourning for a fortnight in the iron mount- 
ains of Marquette, and came from the forest to the steamer to go up 
Lake Superior to the head of the lake. 

As we passed from the harbor Mr. Sumner said that for two weeks 
he had seen no newspapers, and was ignorant of all that had trans- 
pired in the outer world during that time. I had the pleasure of 
giving him the last dailies from the principal cities of the Union. 
As he glanced over the pages his attention became fixed, his eye kin- 
dled, he hurried from paper to paper, looking hastily in each, and 
then went for his portfolio and prepared to write. He looked at the 
clock, went out upon the deck, inquired the name of a rocky island 
we were then passing, and wrote, folded, and directed a letter. It 
was a beautiful Sabbath morning in summer. The waters of the 
lake mirrored the rocky outline of Granite Island and the mountains 
on the mainland. The scenery was beautiful, the air delicious, the 
passengers joyous. 

The newspapers which Mr. Sumner had received were full of rec- 
ords of the whole busy world. " But none of these things moved 
him." 

He had learned from the newspapers that one comparatively 
obscure but noble man was languishing in prison in a Christian 
country, on the Christian Sabbath, for refusing to obey the behests 
of slavery and refusing to oppress the slave; and then and there Mr. 
Sumner wrote to Passmore Williamson in prison, that thrilling letter 
which not only cheered the prisoner in his cell, but electrified the 
Christian world. 



But I will not dwell longer on such illustrations. To recount them 
would be to repeat the history of his life. Nor will I further eulo- 
gize the Great Commoner of the nation. Whether in intellect and 
genius he will rank among the more or the less gifted of the world's 
bright spirits, none will deny to him the proud position of usefulness 
and faithfulness to which he devoted his life. For him to have been 
either too high or too low, too great or too small, would alike have 
unfitted him for the grand achievements of his distinguished career. 

It has been said that along our Pacific coast the light-house should 
not be placed on the lower headlands that receive the shock of the 
incoming wave, lest the waves should sweep away the foundations, 
and the fog-bank and the mist-wreath should too often obscure the 
beacon and conceal the warning light from the eyes of the imperiled 
mariner; nor on the overlooking mountain's height, where the mount- 
ain and the pharos would alike be encompassed by the brooding 
storm-clouds of those higher altitudes; but midway of these extremes, 
in that serene mid-region between the counter air-currents — those 
that sweep the ocean and the shore below, and those that uphold the 
cloudy firmament above. Thus, it may be, that along the border- 
land of human destiny he who shall have wrought the grandest 
benefit to humanity may have neither the warm affections and tender 
emotions that cluster around the homelier walks of life, nor yet the 
transcendent genius of him — 

" Who on mind's high steep can stand 
And marshal with his sceptered hand 

The whirlwind and the cloud ; 
Can write his name too deep a dye 
In lightning's traces on the sky." 



Address of Mr. Phillips, of JLunsas. 

Mr. Speaker : I shall say but little, since no words I could utter 
would add to the fame of the illustrious statesman. And yet I 



ADDRESS OF MR. PHILLIPS ON THE 



come to offer a humble tribute to his memory from old free Kansas. 
The State I have in part the honor to represent, in its early struggles 
for existence and freedom, elicited the warmest sympathy of Charles 
Sumner, and called forth from him some of the grandest parliament- 
ary efforts that dignified the history of the Government. 

His great speech on the Crime against Kansas was not only ani- 
mated by that spirit of lofty philanthropy which ever came naturally 
from his great, magnanimous heart, but was thrilled through and 
through with the highest conception of popular liberty in America. 
That speech, too, entailed on him long years of suffering, and was 
doubtless the means of prematurely depriving his country of services 
she ill could spare, and the world of a life as eminent as it was pure. 

In the history of the past twelve years, among the galaxy of great 
men who may be styled the fathers of our second revolution; the 
men who when the storms beat and the winds blew, when the timid 
were timid and the faithless faithless, seized the very misfortunes and 
weaknesses which threatened the Government, and hewed them into 
the foundation-stones of a reconstructed Republic — among these 
men six names stand in bold relief: Sumner, Chase, Lincoln, Ste- 
vens, Seward, Stanton, and they are all gone. They did their 
share of the work ably and fearlessly, and God Almighty blessed 
them in this, that ere they died they had the privilege of seeing peace 
and liberty clasp hands across a regenerated continent. 

Sumner was one of the best types of our public men. A scholar 
so ripe, an orator so eloquent, that as orator or scholar we may justly 
feel proud of him as the peer of any orator or scholar of any country 
or any time; a statesman who squared his political principles by the 
fundamental maxims of right and wrong ; a politician whose sympa- 
thies-were with the downtrodden and the weak, and who gave to 
humanity rather than to party; a gentleman withal, whose life was 
so dignified and pure that even his enemies never dared with the 
breath of slander to sully his fame. 



LIFE AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



Some^men are great actors; others eminent for executive ability; 
others are great thinkers. Among the latter no one was more emi- 
nent than Charles Sumner. He seized the fresh but crude ideas as 
they floated up from the public mind, and molded them into sym- 
metry. Always clinging to the fundamental maxims of equality and 
right, when dangers threatened the edifice that is the safeguard for 
the security and liberty of forty millions of people, he substituted jus- 
tice as a political foundation, instead of expediency, and gave to the 
Declaration of Independence fresh life and better application. 

Ours is a government of the people. We all feel most acutely the 
necessity that the public pulse shall beat in unison with the outer and 
inner life of all our politics. He who aspires to this duty has a double 
task; to appreciate and mold public sentiment, and then to lead it. 
In both, Charles Sumner was eminent. He stood like another 
Moses before the people. The public mind was oppressed with 
danger, and part of it befogged with prejudice. Old Constitution 
theorists had peddled their doctrines at every cross-road in the 
country. Many true men wavered, when Sumner, standing with his 
compatriots and, like the ancient prophets, seizing the rod directly 
from the hands of God Almighty, the rod of eternal justice, smote it 
upon the troubled waters and bade the murmuring people " Go for- 
ward ! " 

Step by step they led them higher, higher, step by step, until, on 
the top of another Mount Pisgah, they, amid the uncertainties, the 
storm, and the darkness, saw the promised land of future American 
politics stretched out for the feet of a progressive people. When 
Mr. Sumner spoke he spoke not only to the Senate Chamber — the 
Republic was his auditorium. His speeches went forth freighted 
with the best life and thoughts of the time; went forth to the whole 
country, to arouse a universal interest and provoke a universal utter- 
ance. 

His sudden death was not the extinction of a life, but its apothe- 



112 ADDRESS OF MR. PHILLIPS. 



osis. His monument is built in the history of his country. To-day 
we stand reverently before the great dead, while all the shadows of 
conflicting opinion and the bitterness of partisanship have melted 
away. 

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn. 

The motion was agreed to; and accordingly the House adjourned. 



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